It’s not necessarily the deepest day. Not necessarily the biggest line. Just the day that somehow survives every other memory. By August, that's the one that's left.

August is a strange month for guides. Rivers have replaced snow. Mountain bikes replaced splitboards. The sun rises too early and sets too late. The idea of winter feels almost ridiculous. We tell ourselves we're enjoying the break. But every guide I know eventually starts doing the same thing. Before we start talking about next season. We are talking about that one day from last season.

"Remember that day..."

That's how it always starts. Maybe it was chest-deep powder. Maybe it was perfect corn. Maybe it was a client who finally understood why we do this. Maybe it was simply the people who happened to be sitting in the helicopter that morning. Funny thing is, by August I've usually forgotten the number of runs. I couldn't tell you how many vertical feet we rode. I don't remember the snow study, the avalanche forecast, or even what I had for lunch.

I remember the people.

This year, that day is easy to pinpoint.

January 17, 2026.

I first met Mikey Franco in October of 1994.

I had packed everything I owned and moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Coming off a few seasons of teaching snowboarding, first at Hunter Mountain, New York, and then at Okemo, Vermont, I thought I had some experience.

Mikey knew better.

Still, whatever he saw in a twenty-two-year-old kid was enough to offer me a job when we met at the Jackson Hole Ski Corporation job fair.

I was in. There was just one problem. I needed a haircut.

Back then, then Jackson Hole Mountain Resort had a hair policy that wasn't far off from the New York Yankees. After a few summers of raft guiding in West Virginia, I was definitely in violation.

So, somewhat reluctantly, I got a haircut. It was my first lesson in professionalism. It wouldn't be my last.

Through those first years teaching at Jackson Hole, Mikey tolerated me and all my antics. Drinking was still part of my routine, along with all the problems that came with it, but looking back, I don’t think alcohol was my biggest fault as an employee.

I simply didn’t want to work.

I wanted to ride.

Jackson Hole was my newly discovered playground, unlike anywhere I had ever been, and every beginner snowboard  lesson I had to teach felt like time I wasn’t spending exploring the mountain. I wasn’t afraid of hard work. I just wanted to be a snowboarder more than I wanted to be a snowboard instructor.

Through it all, Mikey accepted me and continued to help me grow as a snowboarder.

He taught in-house clinics for the snowboard instructors, and I attended regularly. Looking back, it’s funny. I could find every excuse to avoid teaching, but if Mikey was coaching, I was there.

Then Jackson Hole opened the backcountry gates and created a guide service. When the power that be came to him and asked which snowboarder they should hire to guide, Mikey recommended… someone else.

At the time, I was crushed. Today, if I were in Mikey’s shoes, I would have made the same recommendation. I eventually recognized that at the time I did not have enough time in the mountains to be the guide. Mikey understood this long before I did.

Eventually, I realized that time and mentorship were what I needed. I didn’t need a guide’s title. I needed a guide’s education.

So I started showing up.

The snowboard school and the guide service shared a locker room , two different types of outcasts, I attended the morning guide meetings before heading over to work the beginner lift with my first-day snowboard students. When opportunities presented themselves, I shadowed the guides. I watched. I listened. I asked questions. I tried to become useful.

Mikey understood what I was doing.

Some of my other supervisors didn’t. They simply thought I was unreliable and didn’t want or need the work. That was far from the truth. I needed the money as much as anyone else. The desire to learn simply overrode my financial needs.

From their perspective, I was a snowboard instructor always trying to get out of his scheduled lessons. To be fair, that had been true during my first few years at JHMR but now a fire had been lit. I was going to become a guide.

And an education is what I received.

Eventually, I was given the opportunity to guide, first in Jackson, and then in Alaska. Nothing had been handed to me, and the hunger created by that continued to feed the fire to educate myself.

The years of watching, listening, asking questions, and showing up had built something more valuable than a job title. They had built a foundation.

The hunger never left. If anything, earning the opportunity to guide only fed it. Every mentor, every season, every mistake, every avalanche class, every client, and every storm became another lesson.

As my career progressed, Mikey remained a supporter.

When he became an American Association of Snowboard Instructors Development Team rider, he was offered a sponsorship from Burton. At the time, Mikey held the role of Jackson Hole Mountain Ambassador for K2 Snowboards.

Mikey never burned a bridge. He ended his relationship with K2 amicably.

And this time, when K2 needed someone to take his place, he recommended me.

I have maintained that relationship with K2 since 1999.

As my career progressed, our careers diverged. He continued building his own path while I chased mine through Jackson and eventually Alaska. We were no longer working together every day, but our paths continued to run parallel.

Years later, Mikey tapped back into his surfer, skater roots and decided to grow out his blonde locks in what can only be described as a Greatest American Hero fro.

The administration at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort was less enthusiastic. In a decision that seemed suspiciously close to the end of the season, they let him go. The following winter, Mikey was hired back. The hair policy had quietly been amended.

Apparently, even the administration had come to realize that some things were more valuable than a haircut.

Mikey continued to have tremendous success in the instruction world. He traveled the globe teaching instructors how to teach. He became one of the most respected snowboard educators in the world.

He became a legend.

Meanwhile, I was carving out my own niche in guiding.

I became a lead guide in Jackson and Alaska, learning to navigate not only complex terrain but the politics that exist within the guiding world. I committed myself to the AMGA certification process and began building an international career.

Mikey and I were both chasing mastery.

Just in different arenas.

Our paths came together again when Mikey stepped away from the National Team and began his own transition into guiding. He had spent his career teaching others, but he was willing to become a beginner again in a new discipline.

That is a humble thing to do.

Without ever needing to say it, Mikey showed that he believed education never ended.

By then, our roles had changed.

The kid Mikey hired in 1994 had become a man—and a guide—he respected.

But it would be dishonest to tell this story as though Mikey and I spent three decades cheering each other on from opposite sides of the mountain.

Our relationship wasn’t always good.

As we walked our separate paths, there was animosity. There were years when I thought Mikey resented me or didn’t respect me as a guide. I’m sure there were times when he felt the same way about me.

Things were not always easy.

Neither of us was entirely right.

Neither of us was entirely wrong.

Somehow, through all of it, we continued to be friends.

I didn’t have a traditional wedding, but if I had, Mikey would have been my best man.

Even during the difficult years, I never questioned that.

I still couldn’t imagine going through my wedding day without him.

After an injury, Mikey reinvented himself once again.

He founded Franco SnowShapes, a custom snowboard company where every board is handcrafted for the individual who will ride it. Mikey doesn’t begin the process by simply asking for measurements and choosing a shape. He rides with his customers. He watches how they move, how they turn, where they struggle, and what brings them confidence.

Then he shapes the board around the rider.

He creates some of the most beautiful and highly functional snowboards I have ever seen.

Fifteen years after my wedding, I received my wedding gift from Mikey.

He had designed and built a custom splitboard for me. Without my knowing, he worked with my wife, Nancy, to design the graphics on the topsheet. It is a beautiful snowboard.

The board arrived in November of 2025.

I knew Mikey would be in Japan that upcoming winter where I would be working as a heli guide, so I shipped it over there.

Unridden.

It didn’t feel right to make the first turns on it without him.

Heli-skiing in Japan can be fickle.

The previous few days had been all-time. Bluebird powder days. Some of the deepest days I had ever ridden from a helicopter.

I knew I had to get Mikey into the heli while he was there.

I had a scheduled day off and arranged with my boss to create my own group. It would include Mikey and some of our friends. We typically booked three groups a day, but my boss knew how good the conditions were. He also knew I had some important people in town.

After all my careful planning, I got Mikey to the hangar.

Sure enough, the clouds settled in.

Grounded.

What looked like a certain down day dragged on through the morning.

Then, around noon, like magic, everything changed.

I have truly never seen clouds clear as quickly as they do in Japan. What had looked like a guaranteed down day suddenly opened. The ceiling lifted, and the mountains began appearing one ridge at a time.

Go time.

We were the fourth group to load.

Usually, that is not an advantage. On this day, it worked in our favor. With this much new snow we had to be cautious. The three previous groups tiptoed into the terrain and tested the new snow. By the time we lifted off, I had received enough positive beta from the other guides to give us the green light to step it up.

Upon landing at the top, I stepped out of the helicopter and immediately sank into chest deep snow.

Cold. Super light density. Bottomless.

The reason you come to Japan in January.

This group didn’t need a warm-up run.

I went straight to one of the best runs on the mountain: Speed Wall.

Speed Wall is an East-facing pitch and easily one of the steepest runs I have ridden in Japan. Japan is not known for its steep terrain, but Mount Shiribetsu is a volcano, and hidden within its flanks is some exceptional terrain.

Everyone in our group was a snowboarder, which meant there was no easy way to move away from the landing zone. We had to wallow through the snow to reach the entrance to the run.

I led the way.

Franco was close behind me.

At the entrance to Speed Wall, I finally strapped into the board my friend, fellow guide, and would-have-been best man had designed and built for me.

I didn’t have the words for it at the time, but I do now.

If Mikey hadn’t taken a chance on me all those years ago, I would not have been standing on the summit of that beautiful mountain in Japan, about to ride some of the best conditions I had ever seen on a board my friend crafted.

I looked back at him and said “Thank You.”

I dropped in.

I held the fall line a little longer than I normally would, letting the board gather speed beneath me. Then I leaned onto my heels and cranked off the absolute best heelside turn of my life.

I know it was the best because as I looked back I saw Mikey smiling, just seconds before my two-hundred-foot rooster tail erased him from view.

The day kept getting better.

Later, I had the privilege of letting Mikey go first on a run.

I watched him drop in and disappear into a magical tree run with perfect spacing that was lit by amazing afternoon light, and some of the deepest, lightest snow either of us had ever ridden.

At the bottom, we regrouped.

Mikey Franco is a man who has spent more days on a snowboard than most people on the planet. He has ridden around the world. He has taught generations of snowboard instructors. He has dedicated his life to sliding sideways on snow.

He looked at me and said,

“That was the best run of my life.”

Every winter there is that one day.

I think I found mine.

We spent thirteen days together floating The Colorado through the Grand Canyon. He was a guest. I was his guide.

He worked in finance in New York City. I know this because every conversation eventually found its way back to his work. He'd brought a satellite phone, and every evening while the rest of us settled into camp, Kevin would pull it out, extend the antenna, and call New York right there in the middle of camp.

If you've ever tried to use a satellite phone in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, you already know how this story goes.

Every few minutes the call would drop as another satellite disappeared behind two thousand feet of canyon walls. Kevin would eventually reconnect, complain about losing the signal, and jump right back into the conversation as though whatever was happening back in New York simply couldn't wait another week.

Around camp the rest of us became experts at pretending not to listen while simultaneously hearing every word. The guides found it irritating. His friends looked embarrassed. There was an unspoken agreement on river trips that, for a little while at least, we'd all leave the outside world behind.

Kevin seemed unwilling to sign that agreement.

You know the saying; every trip has an asshole. If you look around and can't figure out who it is, maybe it's you. On this trip there was absolutely no doubt. Each guide had their opinion of Kevin, and so did his friends.

Early in the trip Kevin decided my raft was going to be his home base. Every morning his dry bags found their way onto my boat, and every morning so did Kevin. I politely suggested he might enjoy spending a day with one of the other guides. Nope. Every. Single. Day.

Not once did I have the chance to point out the thousands of things the canyon wanted to show him. Tapeats Sandstone. Vishnu Schist. Zoroaster Granite. Canyon wrens whose songs somehow echoed off half-billion-year-old walls. Great blue herons hunting in a desert. The stories behind House Rock, Hance and Crystal. The canyon was trying to introduce itself.

Kevin never let it.

One afternoon, while hiking National Canyon, I finally escaped. I caught up to Terry, our lead guide. If someone asked me to draw a caricature of a Grand Canyon guide, I'd draw Terry. Patagonia baggy shorts that had probably started life bright red decades earlier, now faded almost pink. Long silver hair tied back in a ponytail. A beard that looked like it got trimmed every thirteen days whether it needed it or not. Thirty years in the canyon had written themselves into the lines on his face. He'd been guiding the canyon longer than I'd been alive, and somewhere along the way he'd learned to trust it more than he trusted himself.

He asked how I was holding up with Kevin. I gave him the standard guide answer. "Oh, he's okay. A little challenging."He smiled. He knew I was full of shit. Eventually I admitted what was really bothering me. "I just don't think he's getting it." Terry didn't hesitate.

"Don't worry," he said. "Everybody gets it."

That was it. No explanation. No philosophy. Just complete confidence. If he believed everybody got it, I believed him.

We'd spent twelve days together. We'd run the classic rapids, hiked side canyons, slept beneath impossible stars, and shared meals around the fire. Kevin hadn't said one thing about where he was. Not once.

The morning of day thirteen felt different. Kevin hadn’t bothered to unpack the satellite phone this morning, then he climbed onto my boat without saying much. That caught my attention. The man who had filled every mile of river with conversation barely answered when I asked how he was doing.

Whitmore Wash was only six miles downstream. From there Kevin and his friends would board a helicopter, fly out of the canyon, and spend the night in Las Vegas. We shoved off into the current for one last day together.

I didn't know it at the time, but the next six miles would become the most important six miles of my career.

About thirty minutes into the morning float, I noticed something I hadn't heard all trip.

Silence.

I call it the creak and splash. The creak of the oar in the oarlock. The splash of the blade entering the water. It's one of my favorite sounds in the world.

Then I heard something else.

A man trying not to cry.

Kevin was weeping.

Without thinking, I eased off the oars and let the other rafts drift ahead. I wanted to give him the privacy the canyon had finally asked of him. I laid the oars across the frame, walked to the front of the raft, and sat beside him on the cooler.

I didn't say anything.

I simply put my arm around him.

I have no idea how long we sat there. River time has a way of making clocks irrelevant.

Finally, Kevin looked up. He scanned the canyon walls, took a long breath, and quietly said,

"This place is beautiful."

Then the floodgates opened.

He told me things I'll never repeat. Things he'd carried for a long time. Two men who had spent nearly two weeks sharing a boat finally began sharing a conversation. We found common ground where neither of us expected it. We laughed. We cried.

Somewhere in those final six miles we stopped being guide and guest.

We became friends.

Eventually I had to pick the oars back up and catch the rest of the group. As I rowed, we had the conversation I'd been hoping for since the first day. I pointed out birds, rock layers, little details hidden in the canyon, and for the first time Kevin saw them. I wasn't guiding him anymore. I was sharing the river with a friend.

When we reached Whitmore Wash, Terry was already on shore coordinating the helicopter. Before I landed our boat, I stood up on the rowing seat and yelled across the beach to Terry,

"He got it!"

Terry looked up, smiled, and without missing a beat yelled back,

"Damn... that was a close one."

Every spring, it happens to a whole community. Ski patrollers, lifties, instructors, people who build their winters around chasing storms, even weekend warriors who live for those two days a week. The lifts stop spinning. The snow melts. The routines disappear. And just like that, it’s over.

Not gradually. Just done. And underneath all of it, there’s a question that doesn’t get asked out loud.

Who am I without this?

In the winter, the answer is obvious. You’re the one who knows the terrain, the one who shows up early, the one who rides hard, the one who belongs. There’s identity in it. Structure. Purpose. You’re making decisions that matter. Not just to you, but to people from all walks of life. Different backgrounds, different expectations, different levels of experience. People who, in any other environment, might not have given you the time of day.

The mountains are a great equalizer. Out there, your value isn’t measured by what you have. Not your bank account, not the clothes you’re wearing, not your social media. It comes down to your skill set, your attitude, your ability to move through the terrain and take care of the people around you.

It’s simple. And it’s real.

When you didn’t come from a world where that kind of respect was given, when you had to find your way into it, it sticks with you. It changes how you see yourself.

These people listen. They rely on you. They see you.

Back home, that doesn’t always follow. The ski instructor whose clients hang on every word. The pro who is recognized in the lift line but not at the grocery store. The patroller who carried someone down in a sled and now sits next to them in a coffee shop without being recognized. The heli guide who has access to a multimillion dollar aircraft all winter, and now drives a 25 year old truck on its last legs, listening for every new noise and hoping it makes it to the post office to pick up his last paycheck.

That shift is real. And if you’re not ready for it, it can mess with your sense of value. And then it’s gone. Not forever. Just long enough to feel it. It’s not just the season you’re missing. It’s that version of yourself.

What’s left is space. Space where that identity used to live.

Some people fill it right away. Work. Travel. Distraction. Some people sit in it. Either way, you feel it. Because it’s not just the season ending. It’s a version of yourself that only exists in the mountains. And now you have to figure out what’s left when it’s gone.

Some people handle that space differently. Some lean into it. Some avoid it. Some don’t even recognize what’s happening.

But that shift can be heavier than it looks from the outside. The loss of structure, the loss of purpose, the loss of being needed in the same way. It adds up.

I’ve seen people struggle with it. I lost a friend in the off season, because that space got too big.

That’s the part no one really talks about. We celebrate the season, the snow, the lifestyle. We don’t talk much about what happens when it’s gone.

Whether you live and work in a mountain town or travel for extended periods to chase the work, at the end of the season you still have to reenter and deal with the change.

In the mountains, everything is clear. Coming home is where it gets complicated.

Reentry doesn’t hit all at once. It lingers. At first you don’t notice it. You’re still riding the edge of whatever you just came out of, still sharp, still moving, still carrying the rhythm of decisions, consequence, responsibility.

Physically, it’s over.

Mentally, it takes longer.

Back home, it’s quiet. And the quiet feels louder than anything.

For days afterward, I barely speak. Not because I don’t have anything to say, but because I’m still adjusting.

In the past, I would’ve filled that space with something. I’d sit on the couch, watch baseball, eat popcorn. Alcohol. Work. Anything to avoid the drop. Over time I’ve started to understand what’s actually happening.

It’s not exhaustion. It’s the absence of intensity.

So instead of fighting it, I give it somewhere to go. I move my body. I go outside. I find small ways to get back into flow. Not the same flow, but something close.

I know having the time to step away and decompress like this can look like a luxury. And in some ways, it is. But the reality is, I’ve been working non stop since November. Long days stacked back to back. This isn’t time off. It’s time I need to come back to baseline.

The Weeks Triathlon.

Physical

I ride my bike. I snowboard. I fly fish.

It sounds like a joke, but it’s not. Each one hits something different. The bike burns it out. Legs, lungs, heart rate. It gives the body somewhere to put the residual energy that has nowhere to go at home. Snowboarding brings back familiarity. Edges, balance, speed. It’s not Alaska, but it reminds your system what movement feels like when it matters. Fly fishing slows everything down. Standing in the river, watching current, repeating the same motion over and over. It requires attention, but a different kind. Not urgent. Just present. It pulls your brain out of the big picture and into something small and immediate.

Mental

I do yoga. I eat real food. I talk to a therapist.

During the season, all of that slips. The days are long, the calorie burn is high, and you take what you can get when you can get it. Meals are rushed, usually whatever’s closest, whatever’s fast. Yoga happens when it happens, which usually means not enough to matter.

Getting back to a daily yoga practice. It’s the consistency that matters. That’s where the benefit is.
Eating real food again. Better fuel changes how your body feels and how your mind works.

And then there’s therapy. Talking to someone who isn’t in it with you, who can help you hear your own thoughts out loud. Or just talking with someone who’s been through it, who’s in it right now. There’s something about saying it out loud that makes it real, and something about helping someone else through it that brings you back to yourself.

You’re not recreating the intensity. You’re giving your system a way to come down from it.

In the mountains, the inputs are constant. Speed, consequence, decision-making, exposure. Your system adapts to that level. When it stops, there’s nowhere for it to go.

So you build your own version of it, piece by piece. Something that lets you move, focus, and feel again without needing the full scale of what you just came out of.

There’s no going back to the person you were in the mountains, and there’s no reason to. That version of you exists for that environment. This one has to exist here.

The work is learning how to carry pieces of that clarity back with you without trying to force it, without expecting everything to feel the same.

Because it won’t.

There’s another part of reentry that doesn’t get talked about much. It’s not just you coming home. It’s what home has become while you were gone. While you were in the mountains, your partner built a system that works. A rhythm. A way of doing things. The house runs. Life moves forward. And then you walk back in.

At first, it’s subtle. Things are in different places. Routines have shifted. Small changes that shouldn’t matter, but do. You reach for something and it’s not where it used to be. And for a moment, it hits you. You feel like a guest in your own home. Like you missed something. Like life kept going without you.

But the truth is, it had to.

And at the same time your partner has been running everything on their own. And now you’re back. Their space isn’t just theirs anymore either. The rhythm changes again. Not better. Not worse. Just different.

And just like you, they have to adjust.

Reentry isn’t just something you go through alone. It’s something you both go through, at the same time, in the same space, without always realizing it.

In the past, I would just step back into it. Take control. Reclaim my space. Start moving things back to the way I thought they should be. Not aggressively, just automatically. Like I never left. But I did leave. And things changed while I was gone. They had to.

Reentry isn’t about stepping back into the life you left. It’s about stepping into the one that kept moving without you and learning how to fit into it again.

That doesn’t happen by reacting. It happens by choosing. Choosing when to speak. Choosing when to let something be different. Choosing not to fix everything right away. Choosing how to reenter.

The mountains will always be there. That part of your life doesn’t disappear. But neither does this one. And if you’re not careful, you end up halfway in both. Not fully present in either.

Reentry is the process of choosing where you are and how you show up there. Not perfectly, not all at once, but intentionally.

Reentry is real. The drop, the restlessness, the feeling that something is off.

It’s normal.

Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. It just shows up in other ways, in the way you talk, the way you move through your home, the way you show up for the people around you. Reentry doesn’t fix itself. You have to acknowledge it. You have to have a plan. And if you’re lucky, you have a partner who understands that you’re not coming back broken, just different.

Because winter will come back. It always does. Storms stack. Lifts spin. The machine turns back on. And that version of you will be there.

Who am I without this?

That doesn’t get answered out there.

It gets answered here at home.

 “Don’t go to Alaska as a young man because it will ruin you for anywhere else.” -John Muir

 “When I was 27 years old, I realized if I didn’t change the way I was snowboarding, I probably wasn’t going to make it to 30.” -Jeremy Jones

I went to Alaska when I was 27.

The first run in Alaska hits like nothing else.

Doug Coombs knocked on the door of the minivan John Fitzgerald and I were sleeping in. He said he had one seat in the heli. We ro-shamboed for it. I won.

Minutes later I was standing on top of a mountain in the Tsaina Valley. Doug had chiseled out an entrance through the cornice.

He dropped in first. Ten feet, smooth as a cat, then just started linking turns down the face. It felt like forever before he stopped. By the time he did, he was a dot.

He radioed up. The entrance was a little firm, but it got really good once you were in it.

I stepped up thinking it looked smaller than Corbet’s Couloir. Cleaner. Better.

So, I dropped in. And immediately got humbled.

I fell. And kept falling. The snow was rock hard. I bounced, tumbled, rotated, long enough to realize I had made a mistake, and not long enough to fix it.

Somehow, I stopped. Adrenaline took over. I got back on my feet and pointed it down. And just like Doug said, it got really good.

The best snow I had ever ridden. Big arcs. Rooster tails. Thousands of vertical feet with only Doug’s track ahead of me.

Halfway down I was tired, but there was no force on earth that was going to stop me. I rode it all the way to the bottom.

Doug was standing there, huge smile on his face. He was feeling my joy like it was his own.

In that moment, I had the sense that he might have been remembering his first run in the Chugach, watching it play out through me. Not just the adrenaline.

The awe.

He said, “That entrance was a little tricky.” I had completely forgotten about the crash. The neurochemistry had already erased it. All that was left was the feeling.

I’ve been chasing it ever since.

And then you load back into the helicopter. That’s the part people don’t fully understand. It’s not just where the helicopter can take you, it’s how fast it happens. One minute you’re standing at the bottom, still trying to process what just happened. Adrenaline high. Heart still pounding. Within minutes you’re loading up, lifting off, flying toward another line that doesn’t even look real yet.

The access is unlike anything else. Places you simply can’t get to any other way. Terrain stacked on terrain, zone after zone, all within reach.

And the pilots operate at a level that doesn’t really exist anywhere else in the industry. Precision landings. Tight zones. Real consequence. You’re not just being flown around, you’re being put exactly where you need to be.

And then you’re out, standing on top of something new, still carrying the feeling from the last run and about to do it all again.

From the outside, heli skiing in Alaska looks like the top of the pyramid. Big lines. Fast machines. Limitless terrain.

But Alaska isn’t something you can measure.

From the helicopter, everything looks manageable. Guests lean over, point at lines. “That one looks good.” And it does.

From above, the features compress. Angles soften. Distances disappear.

But the moment you drop in, Alaska starts to expand. The pitch is steeper than it looked. The walls are bigger. The exposure is real.

The length is what gets people. Runs just keep going. What looked like a single face turns into multiple zones stacked on top of each other. You finish one section and realize you’re only halfway down. Some of these runs are twice the vertical of a resort lap back in the Lower 48.

There’s no reset. You’re in it the whole time.

Then they go home and try to explain it. Everyone does. But Alaska doesn’t translate. They show photos. Try to describe the line. And people nod, because they think they understand.

They don’t.

Because until you’ve stood on top of something that big, felt it expand underneath you, realized halfway down you’re not even close to the bottom, there’s no reference point. The words don’t carry it. The photos flatten it.

And what you’re left with is a gap between what happened and what you can explain.

Storms roll in. Visibility disappears. The mountains that felt so big the day before are just gone.

You wake up thinking about weather before your feet hit the floor. You’re already behind. Winds shifted overnight. Temps didn’t drop like the model said. The snow you trusted yesterday isn’t the same snow today.

Everyone wants to know what it’s going to do.

And eventually, you realize they’re not asking about the forecast anymore.

They’re asking you.

You sit. You wait. You check the forecast again even though you already know the answer.

As a guide, those days aren’t off days. They’re harder, more stressful than flying days in a different way. There’s no release, no outlet. Just pressure building, in the group, in the schedule, in yourself.

You’re managing expectations with nothing to give back yet. And over time, that weight adds up. Not the big days. The down days. That’s what wears guides out. Eventually, it’s part of why some of them stop coming back.

For guests, it hits differently. Once you’ve felt what Alaska can give, the absence of it hits harder than you expect. Not quite pain. Something closer to withdrawal. The restlessness, the pacing, the constant checking of the weather.

Guides get creative. We ski tour, ice climb, ride snowmachines, dog sled, shoot guns, build fires, really big fires. Anything to break up the waiting.

Nothing we do at the lodge replaces the real thing.

The adrenaline. The dopamine.

There’s nothing down here that comes close.

So you wait. Waiting for the ceiling to lift. Waiting for the machine to start. Waiting to get back into the place where everything matters again.

Because there’s something else that happens.

You build a tolerance.

That first run, the one you think you’ll never forget, doesn’t go away. But it changes. By day five, the run that would have defined your entire trip on day one, now becomes a warm-up lap.

Not because it got smaller. Because you adjusted.

Nothing about Alaska changes.

You do.

Your baseline moves. You start looking for something steeper, longer, more committing.

There’s no going back to that first run. You can remember it, but you can’t recreate it.

So you chase it. Not the line.

The feeling.

That mix of adrenaline, focus, and something deeper.

Awe.

Over the years, if you allow it, something else happens.

You realize you don’t just chase it.

You witness it.

Every week, you watch someone else step into Alaska for the first time. And for a moment, you’re right back there, not because you found your first run again, but because you got to feel it through them.

And when it’s over, you go home and try to explain it.

But just like them, you can’t.

Because you don’t come back the same.

People often tell me I’m lucky.

Lucky to be a heli guide. Lucky to snowboard for a living. Lucky to ride helicopters into the mountains instead of sitting behind a desk.

I’ve heard it from guests, from friends back home, and sometimes from people working alongside us. Lodge staff, drivers, kitchen crews. People who work just as hard in the same environment but experience the job differently.

For a long time, I agreed without hesitation. Of course, I’m lucky. How could I not be?

But over the years, that word started to feel incomplete.

Most people encounter this job at its peak. They see bluebird powder days and the polished version that gets shared. What they don’t see is the long stretch of work that makes those days possible. Those high reward days are not the job itself. They’re the return on years of preparation that rarely make it into the frame.

What Lucky Leaves Out

Luck suggests ease. It suggests that the outcome arrived without much intention.

What it doesn’t capture are the choices made quietly over time. Choosing uncertainty over stability. A life that moves often and asks a lot in return.

It doesn’t include the responsibility that comes with managing other people’s fear and expectations in terrain where decisions matter. It doesn’t account for the physical wear that accumulates slowly, or the emotional discipline required to show up calm and steady when conditions are complex.

None of this is a complaint. It’s simply context.

This work asks for commitment. And commitment, over time, has a cost.

The Work Before the Work

Luck also skips over the years spent trying to qualify for a seat at the table.

Becoming a heli guide was its own long apprenticeship, earned through repetition, judgment, and real consequence, and in many ways harder and more rewarding than any certification that came after.

Becoming an AMGA certified splitboard guide wasn’t a straight line. It meant years of training, exams, travel, expense, and failure, often inside systems that were never designed with snowboarders in mind.

There was quiet resistance. Extra scrutiny. The understanding that mistakes wouldn’t be seen as individual, but as proof. That if you wanted to stay, you had to be not just competent, but unimpeachable.

Layered on top of that was the work of becoming a professional level avalanche instructor. Not just someone who could read snow, but someone who could teach it clearly, conservatively, and under pressure. That meant years of courses, mentoring, evaluations, and standing in front of rooms where credibility had to be earned again and again.

None of that felt lucky at the time. It felt slow. Expensive. Often frustrating. Sometimes isolating.

But it built something durable.

The Cost of Staying

There are other things luck does not account for.

It does not account for losing friends to the same mountains that give so much joy. For receiving phone calls that permanently divide life into before and after. For learning how to carry grief quietly because the work still needs to be done the next morning.

It does not account for working injured. Not because it was smart or brave, but because absence in this world is rarely forgiven. Because momentum matters.

It does not account for how pain becomes normalized. For how you learn to manage injuries as part of the job, to compartmentalize discomfort so completely that it sometimes takes years to understand what it has cost you.

These things are not rare. They are common enough in this work that they rarely get discussed openly.

They are part of the price of staying.

The Convenient Version of Lucky

Lucky is also a convenient word for people who once thought they wanted this life and then realized how hard it actually is.

It’s easier to say you’re lucky than to admit that the lifestyle came with costs they were not willing to carry. Easier than acknowledging the nights away from home, the uncertainty, the physical toll, and the constant exposure to consequence.

Some people value stability more. Others value meaning more. Neither choice is better. They are just different.

But calling someone lucky is a way of flattening that distinction. It avoids owning the tradeoffs. It reframes a deliberate exit as wisdom and a deliberate commitment as accident.

That version of lucky is less about admiration and more about relief.

There’s also a version of lucky that comes from employers. They’re happy to use experienced guides in the marketing. Years in the mountains, certifications, judgment under pressure. That experience sells seats and builds trust. But when guides ask for a living wage or a schedule that doesn’t grind them into the ground, the tune changes. Then you get reminded how lucky you are to be there at all. Lucky becomes a shutdown phrase. A way of saying you should be grateful instead of fairly paid, flexible instead of supported. Most guides know exactly what that is. Not appreciation. Not partnership. Just a reminder that there’s always someone younger, cheaper, and hungrier waiting in the wings.

A Line I Borrowed

A musician friend of mine once responded to being called lucky with a line I’ve carried ever since.

“I’m sorry you got in the wrong line on career day.”

It made me laugh, but it also stuck.

Not because it’s cruel, but because it’s honest. Nobody stumbles into this life by accident. People opt in, again and again, knowing it won’t look like most other paths.

Luck might get you in the door. But hard work, accountability, and perseverance are what keep you in the room.

Still Choosing It

Over time, my relationship with this work has changed. It no longer feels like something I have to defend or justify, either to myself or to anyone else. It’s simply a set of choices I keep making, season by season, with a clearer sense of their weight.

I pay closer attention now to what this work gives and what it quietly takes. I’m more careful about where I attach my name, more honest about what I can carry, and more aware of where leverage actually lives. That shift has made the work steadier, not smaller.

If someone wants to call this lucky, maybe they’re not entirely wrong.

I’m lucky to have found work that matters to me, and to have stayed long enough to understand its cost.

But luck didn’t carry me here.

Choice did.

And I’m still choosing it.

Author’s note: I’m not engaging the comment section on this. I’m sharing it to offer support and perspective, not to debate strangers online.

A fatal avalanche in the backcountry took lives this week.

Like many others, I turned to social media for information and found judgment instead.

When an avalanche takes lives, the impact ripples through mountain communities. Within those places, tragedies like this are met first with pause. With phone calls. With check ins. With the quiet inventory of moments many of us have faced in a life spent in complex terrain.

Did I know anyone who may have been involved?

Living in mountain towns means carrying an accumulation of events like this. When another accident occurs, it does not arrive in isolation. It reopens old wounds. Friends and loved ones already gone. Even if you do not know the people involved this time, the grief is felt through the loss you already carry.

Online, it becomes something else.

Headlines spread quickly. Comment sections fill faster. What many people are looking for is information, context, and clarity. What arrives instead is certainty from a distance. For some, judgment becomes a way to separate themselves from the loss. By pointing out what they believe the people involved did wrong, they reassure themselves that the outcome was avoidable, that it could not happen to them. Criticism becomes a kind of insulation, a quiet declaration of I would never make that mistake. But it is worth asking who benefits from that certainty. These comments do not add clarity or reduce risk. They simply relocate uncertainty away from ourselves and ask us to believe we stand on safer ground.

Social media rewards speed, confidence, and reaction. It turns complex human loss into engagement, and engagement into profit. In that environment, restraint looks like silence and humility reads as absence.

The reality is that decisions made in avalanche terrain are shaped by context we will never fully know. Conditions change. Information is incomplete. What matters most is often felt rather than documented, and much of it disappears the moment the slope moves or the day ends.

Respect, in moments like this, begins with admitting what we cannot know.

Judging those choices from the outside, or after the fact, is not clarity. It is distance, amplified by a system that rewards reaction over understanding.

I choose not to step into the noise.

Many people who choose to spend time in the mountains are doing so, at least in part, to step outside that system. A few days in a remote backcountry hut offers more than skiing. It offers relief from the constant churn of opinion and the pressure to perform certainty online.

There is irony in watching a tragedy that unfolded far from screens get consumed most aggressively by people who experienced it only through one.

A life in the mountains is not about thrill seeking. It is about presence, consequence, and responsibility. That is why losses like this cut so deeply.

Yes, there is risk. And no, risk is not recklessness. Most people who move through these places do so with care, preparation, and respect for uncertainty.

When tragedy strikes, the right response is not judgment. It is grief. It is looking after each other. After an accident like this, the weight does not fade with the headlines. It is carried by many people, long after the news cycle has moved on.

For those of us who work in these places, this is not abstract. It is personal. We carry these moments forward into better decisions, better conversations, and quieter leadership.

I am sharing this not to argue or explain the accident, but to stand with those affected and with those carrying it forward out of public view.

Sometimes the most meaningful response is refusing to add to the noise.

Before there are opinions, there is loss.

That deserves our attention first.

Jamie Weeks is a guide and writer exploring risk, leadership, and what time spent outdoors can teach us about how we live.

The helicopter lifts and the world compresses. Rotor wash hammers the next group waiting their turn, leaving them looking like powdered donuts, static snaps in the headset, fuel and cold metal fill the cabin. Guests lean forward in their seats. Someone smiles too hard. Someone grips the door frame like it matters.

They see a heavy pack, shovel, probe, rope, and extra gear built for worst case scenarios. They see what a guide carries to manage risk.

They don’t see what else the guide carries.

Guiding heli skiing isn’t just about terrain. It’s about regulating people. Your voice becomes the forecast. Your posture becomes the avalanche bulletin. Your confidence sets the tempo of the day. If you look calm, they relax. If you hesitate, they feel it instantly. If you look uncertain, uncertainty propagates faster than wind slab sitting on surface hoar. So you learn to eliminate variables. You don’t bring your personal life into the heli. You don’t show doubt. You don’t show grief. Clients bring emotion. Mountains bring danger. The guide brings stability. The guide doesn’t react to weather. He becomes it.

That was The Warrior. A term I have borrowed from Carl Jung. He identified The Warrior archetype as the part of a person that fights for what matters, protects boundaries, endures hardship, and acts with discipline and courage under pressure.

Years ago, another guide showed up different. Not late. Not sloppy. Just quieter. The night before, his dog had died. He mentioned it while tightening his harness. Not dramatic. Not emotional. Just honest.

The guests felt it immediately. Someone said they were sorry. Someone put a hand on his shoulder. The mood shifted. I watched from the edge of the pad, adjusting my pack. I didn’t feel sympathy. I felt irritation. Not because he was grieving, but because he had changed the atmosphere.

In heli skiing, atmosphere is safety. When the guide changes, the system changes. I didn’t think he was weak. I thought he had crossed the line by allowing the guests in. At the time, I was certain of that.

The line found me later. Bluebird morning. High pressure. Cold smoke. The kind of day you wait weeks for. My phone rang just before loading. It was my brother. Our mother was in the hospital. Emergency surgery. The odds weren’t good. I hadn’t spoken to her in years.

For a moment, the mountains felt far away. Then I looked up. Pilot waiting. Guests lined up. Rotors spinning. The day wasn’t going to pause.

So neither did I.

I told my brother to call the dispatcher when the surgery was over. The dispatcher was a friend, someone I trusted, someone on my side of the line. Minutes later, I was back in motion. Beacon checks. Radio checks. Snowpack talk. Someone asked if it was going to be a good day. I said yes.

Midday, the radio crackled.

“All is good back home.”

That was all. No one else knew what it meant. I nodded once and started talking about terrain. We snowboarded. I made decisions. I made jokes. Guests went home with stories. Inside, everything else was sealed off.

That was the Warrior.

Years before that, I learned what it feels like to be wrong in the mountains. Wyoming. Continental snowpack. Wind where it didn’t belong. I stepped into terrain I thought I understood. The slope fractured above me. Not slowly. Not politely.

The surface dropped out and started moving. The world tilted. Trees came sideways. Snow came from every direction at once. I remember thinking, clearly and calmly, this is how people die.

I fought for direction, hit a tree hard enough to stop, and felt the slide pour past me, leaving me pinned and breathing. I walked away. Barely.

Afterward, I did what guides do. I analyzed the snowpack. Listed the human factors. Rebuilt the decision tree. I did not touch the emotional aftermath. I buried it.

That was part of what I carried.

For a long time, I believed this was professionalism. Emotion clouds judgment. Doubt slows decisions. So I trained myself to be stable. Unreadable. Reliable. Positive. Anger became discipline. Fear became precision. Grief became silence. Humor became armor. I didn’t feel less than other people. I just felt everything alone. And I called that strength.

The shift started to happen. The shift didn’t come from collapse. It came from repetition. Late nights in lodges. Empty bars. Guides talking when the clients were gone.

“I’m exhausted.”

“I snap at everyone.”

“I feel nothing unless it’s dangerous.”

I listened. And I heard myself. I wanted to talk about it.

The first time I talked about it publicly felt wrong. A classroom in a ski town. Fluorescent lights. Plastic chairs. Twenty guides waiting for avalanche theory. I told them about the heli day. About my mother. About the radio call. About finishing the day like nothing happened. I didn’t dramatize it. I said, “I did my job.”

The room went quiet. Not awkward quiet. Listening quiet.

“We spend our lives managing avalanche risk,” I said. “No one teaches us how to manage what happens inside us.”

Afterward, an old guide waited until everyone else left.

“I thought I was the only one who did that,” he said.

That sentence stayed with me.

For years, the Warrior in me believed survival was the goal: stay steady, stay silent, get the job done. Warrior 2.0 didn’t abandon that discipline, but it added something new. I began teaching mental fitness, I stepped into what Jung would call the Magician, the part of me that stopped treating pressure as something to endure and started treating it as something to understand. Instead of just carrying the weight, I began to study it, translate it, and share it. The Warrior kept me alive in the mountains. The Magician helped me understand what the mountains were doing to me, and why.

Now I teach mental fitness the same way I teach snow. Not emotionally. Practically. At heli bases. In avalanche courses. In guide trainings. Boots drying by the fire. Radios charging on tables. Snow ticking against windows.

“You don’t dump your emotions on guests. You don’t bring chaos into the mountains. But if you bury everything forever, it will surface somewhere else. Usually in your relationships. Your decisions. Your body.”

They don’t argue. They’ve seen it.

And slowly, something shifts. Guides talk more. Teams debrief more than snowpack. Silence becomes less heroic.

Something in my guiding days has changed too. I still manage risk and terrain, but now I pay attention to the unseen dynamics, fear, tension, meaning, that shape every decision long before anyone drops in.

On the first run, when the helicopter drops us on a ridge and the pilot lifts away, the noise fades. The mountains go quiet. Usually this is where guides rush. Radios on. Terrain briefing. “Follow me.”

Instead, I slow this moment down.

“Before we drop in,” I say, “take a second. Look around. Think about where you are. Think about how you got here. Most people never stand in a place like this.”

They look confused at first. Then they look around. Wind on the ridge. Light on the peaks. Silence after the helicopter leaves.

“I’m grateful to be here with you today,” I say. Not dramatic. Not spiritual. Just true.

Then we ride.

I now let the guests in. Letting them in doesn’t compromise the experience, it deepens it.

At the end of the day, when the helicopter lands and the engine winds down, the noise fades. Guests step out into sunlight and relief. Someone claps me on the shoulder.

“Hell of a day,” they say.

I nod.

They don’t see the calculations, the doubt, the memories, the weight. They see what they came for. And that’s fine.

I still carry the gear, I still carry responsibility, and I still carry the group, but I no longer believe I have to carry everything alone. I let the weather move through me instead of becoming it. When my dog of thirteen years died, I carried his ashes into the mountains and spread them in a place that mattered to me. I did it in front of the guests I was guiding that day. I told them what I was doing and why. Nothing collapsed. The mountains did not change. The group did not feel less safe. In that moment, I understood something the Warrior in me had never allowed: silence is not the same thing as strength.

Something in the culture around guiding has started to shift. Guides are talking more openly about pressure, fatigue, and the cost of holding everything together. In classrooms, lodges, and briefing rooms, the conversations are changing. Teaching mental fitness has made me part of those conversations rather than outside of them. I am learning, along with others, that carrying the weight differently does not weaken the profession. It makes it more honest, and in many ways, more resilient.

The mountains taught me how to manage risk. They never taught me what it costs to carry everything alone. I realized that strength is not defined by how much I could carry, but by how much I was willing to let others carry with me.

The Porch

The Kasino Club was tight.

Not cozy. Tight.

Dining room tables jammed in close. Only enough room around the bar for a few people. If you wanted space, you went outside.

So everyone did.

On the front porch.

That porch was the real room. A hitching post out front. Space to lean. Cowboy boots and river sandals on wood. Double tall whiskeys in pint glasses. Elbows on rails. Guides, locals, river trash, whoever had earned the right to stand there. The dirt road ran just feet away, and if tourists drove through too fast and kicked up dust, the locals took it personally. Speed limit enforcement was community-based. Rocks were involved.

It wasn’t hostile.

It was protective.

The porch wasn’t where you went.

It was where you ended up.

Where the stories lived.

Where the bullshit got filtered out.

Where you leaned and watched the town endure the tourists.

And it was where Graham could see you.

That was my introduction.

Not the bar.

Not Graham.

The porch.

Graham

John Graham was from New Jersey.

Dry humor. Northeast grit. Zero tolerance for bullshit.

He ran the Kasino Club the same way he lived his life, honest, unimpressed, and with no interest in pretending. The motto was Service with a Snarl, and he meant it. He would call out his own customers for being dumbasses and somehow make you like him more for it. No fake hospitality. No performance. You got fed, you got poured, and you got treated like an adult.

The place was two businesses pretending to be one.

A “fine” dining restaurant on one side, white tablecloths, date nights, tourists trying to feel local.

A locals’ river trash bar on the other, whiskey, boots, dirt, and stories that didn’t need polishing.

No separation. No apology.

Just life stacked on life.

Graham had come through Jackson, then landed in Stanley and found the river. He had already walked a road a lot of us were still on. He didn’t talk about it. He didn’t need to. He just held the space.

And he watched.

That was his thing. He noticed people. Not in a nosy way, but in a quiet, cataloging way. Who belonged. Who didn’t. Who needed a little extra room.

The Yankees

And the Yankees were always on.

Not background noise.

Not casual viewing.

On.

That was non-negotiable.

I remember a June night when some guests from Utah wanted to watch “the game.” Apparently, they thought the Utah Jazz in the playoffs was more important than a blowout early-season Yankees game. They didn’t know what kind of bar they were in.

When they asked Graham to change the channel, he told them he’d gladly do it for $800,000. They could buy the bar and put whatever fucking game they wanted on the TV. Until then, we watched the Yankees in his bar.

One weekday afternoon Graham was behind the bar when he noticed my ankle.

The tattoo.

Yankees.

He didn’t say anything at first. Just looked at it. Looked at me. Let it sit.

Then he said,

“Well I’ll be damned. You’ve got a lifetime Snarly Card.”

The Snarly Card was a weekday thing. Before five. Twenty bucks got you a punch card for ten drinks. Local discount. The kind of system built entirely on trust and memory. No computers. No tracking. Just Graham.

White card stock. Ten punches. Re-up when you ran out.

He didn’t sell me one.

He just gave me one.

Gold.

Lifetime.

Never punched.

Never expiring.

Because real Yankee fans recognize real Yankee fans.

We talked about them the way only real Yankee fans do, brutal, sarcastic, disappointed, loyal, and somehow still hopeful. Nicknames for players. Disbelief at bullpen decisions. Front office incompetence dissected like a crime scene. “Nobody hates the Yankees more than Yankee fans” wasn’t a joke. It was a mission statement.

And just like that, I was in.

The double talls got cheaper.

The porch got easier.

And the place got smaller in the best way.

It wasn’t about the discount.

It was about the recognition.

The Card

I still carry it.

It’s in my wallet right now.

The Gold Snarly Card.

Lifetime. Never punched.

It sits next to things that matter. A picture of my wife. ID. A credit card. A few old scraps of paper I should probably throw away. And that gold piece of card stock that hasn’t been valid in years and somehow still is.

Protection.

That’s what it feels like.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in a talisman way. In a quiet, steady way, the same way my White Hat does. A symbol more than an object. A reminder that there are places in this world where I belong without explanation. Where I am known. Where I am welcome.

It carries the echo of all those days at the K Club. The porch. The whiskey. The laughter. The music. The nights that felt endless and the mornings that came too early. It carries a version of me that didn’t need to be impressive. Didn’t need to be careful. Didn’t need to be anything but present.

It’s not about drinking.

It never was.

It’s about being held by a place.

And by a man.

How I Came to the Kasino

I came to Stanley through the river.

Winter and early spring were the mountains, Jackson, Alaska, snowboarding, avalanche forecasts, early mornings, long days, and the constant hum of responsibility. I was visible. Recognizable. “The snowboard guide.” The guy people watched. The guy people judged. My guard was always up. Even when I was off, I wasn’t really off.

By the time the light started stretching and the snowpack began to shrink, I was ready to disappear.

So I followed the snowmelt.

Off the peaks and into the canyons. Trading snowboard boots for sandals, boards for oars, cold smoke for hot dust. The same water, just a different expression.

Guiding on the Middle Fork was a release in a way I didn’t understand until much later. Out there, I wasn’t the guide. I was just another guide, another guy with dirt under his nails, callouses on his hands, cracks on his feet, sunburn on his knees. No spotlight. No mythology. Just one of the crew.

That anonymity was oxygen.

And Stanley… Stanley was the exhale.

The porch.

The bar.

Graham.

That was the sequence.

Local Boys Done Good

Graham remodeled the bar one year to turn it into more of a honky tonk. Remodeled might be generous. The work was done by locals paying off bar tabs, so nothing ran straight and no one pretended it would. Walls leaned. Corners wandered. The dance floor was particle board. The new stage had a garage door behind it, and the bass players padded it with foam and duct tape so they wouldn’t crack their heads open when the music got going.

It wasn’t pretty.

It was functional.

And it worked, because it was built the same way the place was run, by the people who lived there, with what they had, when they could.

Tucked into that chaos was a small stage that somehow held the town together more than any official venue ever could.

Graham was an advocate for all local music and gave it a place to live. He opened the door to anyone willing to play it straight and loud, but no group more so than Tyler and the Trainrobbers. They claimed the title of house band and earned it, playing the K Club so often that by the time their first album was finally released, I realized I knew every word without ever trying to learn them. The songs had just settled in, absorbed through nights on the dance floor, while playing foosball, whiskey at the rail, music that felt like it belonged to the room as much as the walls did.

Reckless Kelly.

Micky & the Motorcars.

Two bands. Four brothers. Born and raised in Stanley. Local kids who followed the music to Austin, Texas and somehow never stopped being local. They did it right. They left. Built something. And still came home, bringing their music and their friends back to that tiny stage in that chaotic bar in that tiny town.

Local boys done good.

That mattered.

It told you what kind of place this was.

And what kind of man Graham was for holding space for it.

The Mustache Night

Rigging Middle Fork trips is the hard work.

The part nobody sees.

You get off one trip. Unpack. Clean everything. Dry everything. Repack food. Repack gear. Load the trucks. Drive back into Boundary Creek. Rig it all again. And if it’s low water, you deadhead the gear down to the airstrip at Mile 25 so the guests can fly in the next morning.

Deadheading happens on what should be your day off.

It isn’t.

It’s just more river.

Heavy boats. No passengers. Low water, rock dodging, getting stuck, really stuck. No payoff. Just logistics. Just responsibility. The kind of work that doesn’t make stories, but makes everything else possible. It’s the quiet tax you pay to do this job well.

And somehow, my favorite day of every August trip.

One week, we had just finished a Middle Fork trip. We were supposed to pack, drive in, rig at Boundary, camp, and float in the morning.

The responsible plan.

The correct plan.

Instead, Micky & the Motorcars were playing in Stanley.

So we borrowed the company rig.

“Borrowed,” in the loose, river-guide sense of the word.

We drove back into town.

No debate. No vote. Just a collective, unspoken agreement that this was more important.

Because sometimes the right decision isn’t the correct one.

Sometimes it’s the human one.

That night, Micky & the Motorcars played the Kasino.

And the entire place decided to mess with Graham.

Back then he had a mustache. Hawaiian shirt. Cowboy hat. Mustache. No irony. No apology. That was the uniform.

So the band and the bar staff decided to honor him the only way that place knew how, by roasting him publicly.

Everyone shaved mustaches. Or grew fake ones. Or taped something questionable to their face. Hawaiian shirts appeared. Cowboy hats came out of nowhere. By the time the first song started, half the bar looked like a bad Graham cosplay convention.

I had just come off a Middle Fork trip. Eight days in the canyon. River dirt. Sunburn. No mirror. I had just enough growth to shave into a truly terrible mustache, the kind that looks like a mistake, not a choice.

Perfect.

When Graham finally took it in, band, bartenders, regulars, even a few confused tourists all wearing his face, he laughed. Shook his head. Called us morons. And went right back to pouring drinks.

Because that was him.

No ego. No performance. No need to be above it. He let himself be the joke. Let himself be loved in the language of that place.

Music loud. Room packed. Sweat. Laughter. Bad mustaches everywhere. The kind of night where nothing productive happens and nobody cares.

And I know this now, even if I didn’t then, in all the years of owning that bar, all the trouble it caused him, all the late nights and long days and headaches and chaos, this night made it all worth it.

You could see it on his face.

Those nights, double tall whiskeys in pint glasses, foosball, live music, laughing too loud, talking shit, letting the edges show, some of the happiest times of my life. No performance. No leadership. No responsibility. No one needing anything from me. Just presence. Just belonging.

On rivers and in mountain towns, we lose people. It’s part of the deal, even when no one admits it is. When it happened in Stanley, the Kasino Club was where we gathered first, to share, then to mourn. The porch filled quietly. No speeches. No plans. Just people leaning where people had always leaned. I have poured plenty of double talls on that porch for friends who would never drink them. Let them sit. Let the ice melt. Let the whiskey go warm. I never thought about it back then, but I’m sure Graham cleaned them up the next morning. Just like he did everything else. Quietly. Without comment.

And the Yankees were always on.

That was our thing.

What You Taught Me (Without Ever Teaching Me)

There’s another truth about you that matters just as much.

You taught me how to love.

Not by talking about it.

By living it.

Your love for Shauna is the best example of manhood I have ever seen. You have never said a bad word about her. Not once. You praise her openly, her beauty, her strength, her presence, any chance you get. It’s not forced. It’s not a performance. It’s just genuine.

It’s who you are.

I had never seen that before.

Not up close. Not consistently. Not without conditions attached. I didn’t grow up with a model of healthy, grounded, respectful partnership. I didn’t know what that looked like in real life.

Until you.

You didn’t lecture. You didn’t posture. You didn’t make it a point. You just loved her well, every day, in front of everyone, without apology.

And I watched.

Quietly. Constantly. Absorbing it without realizing I was.

I am a better husband because of you.

Full stop.

Not because you told me how to be.

Because you showed me what it looked like.

That’s lineage.

That’s inheritance.

That’s how men teach each other when they’re not trying to.

The Quiet Part

Graham, I don’t know if you realize how much you shaped me.

I don’t know if you know how often I think about the porch. The bar. The way you stood in the world. The way you loved your wife. The way you let people be themselves without asking them to be better or different.

I got sober.

I became a man I respect.

I became a husband I’m proud of.

I do know this:

You were part of that.

You got sober before I did, and you never preached, just proved it was possible.

You were proof that a man could be steady without being rigid.

Strong without being loud.

Kind without being soft.

Loving without being performative.

You didn’t try to teach.

You just lived.

And I was paying attention.

Thank You

I still carry the card.

The Gold Snarly Card.

Lifetime. Never punched.

Protection.

A reminder that once, exactly as I was, I walked into a place and was seen.

By a man who didn’t need to say much.

By a culture that didn’t need to ask questions.

By a porch that didn’t need to explain itself.

I am grateful for you.

For the space you held.

For the man you are.

For the example you set.

For the way you loved.

For the way you let me be.

This is a thank you.

Not for the drinks.

Not for the bar.

Not for the card.

For the man you were in my life.

And still are.

After the Bar

You sold the bar. The new owners have tried. You can see it. They kept the music. They kept the idea. They even tried to keep the vibe. But the locals never came back. Now there are three bars in town and no center. People drift. They split. They hesitate. Nothing has replaced the Kasino Club.

Because what we were responding to wasn’t the room.

It was the man.

You can’t buy that.

You can’t build that.

You can’t recreate it.

Different paths. Same mountain.

I guided a man heli snowboarding today. Good guy. Kiwi. Easy to talk to. The kind of person who asks questions because he’s genuinely interested, not because he needs to fill the silence. As the machine lifted and we settled into a rhythm, he shared pieces of his story, years spent riding in Jackson in the ’90s and early 2000s, dirt bagging, shoveling snow, chasing winters, snowboarding Glory Bowl naked, living simply for a while before life took on a different shape.

He has a life now that allows him to travel and ride when the opportunity comes. Enough balance to be fully present when he’s there.

On the first run, in passing, he said something that stuck with me. He’d always thought he’d made good life choices, until he met me.

Not as judgment. Not as doubt. More like curiosity. Like realizing there are different ways to arrive at the same place.

Those choices, whatever they were, had led him here, Japan, a seat in the heli on a bluebird, powder day. He was present. Healthy. Capable. Genuinely excited to be snowboarding, always the first one ready, boots strapped on his board, pack zipped. And yet there was patience in him too. He waited his turn, made space for the other guests, carried his stoke lightly. No grasping, no urgency, just appreciation.

Watching him, I didn’t feel comparison.

What I felt was reflection.

Early in my life, I didn’t believe many paths were available to me. I didn’t grow up assuming there would be a safety net if things didn’t work out. I learned, right or wrong, that if I wanted a place in this world, I’d have to earn it outright.

So I didn’t chase ease. I chased usefulness. I chased responsibility. I chased roles where my value was proven daily, not assumed.

When Jackson Hole opened the backcountry gates in 1999, something in me locked into place. I didn’t want access, I wanted responsibility. I didn’t want snowboarding to be recreation, I wanted it to be work, identity, service. I wanted to stand where decisions carried weight.

That choice activated the Warrior.

I was told, often, that snowboarders couldn’t guide skiers. That it wasn’t professional. That it wasn’t safe. That it didn’t belong. And I argued. A lot. Sometimes productively, sometimes not. I pushed back. I questioned assumptions. I made people uncomfortable. I outlasted them all. I learned to guide from skiers who looked past the snowboard and paid attention to how I moved through terrain, how I assessed risk, how I showed up for people.

That trust carried me to Alaska. I fought for, and I like to think I earned respect there too. Not by pushing harder, but by staying steady. Still, the industry resisted. Especially when it came time to formalize things. My struggles with the American Mountain Guides Association and certification weren’t just bureaucratic, they were existential. Do you get to stand here?

Eventually, I outlasted them too and I became a certified splitboard guide. I didn’t need the certification to work, I already had the jobs I wanted, but I needed to finish the argument. With them, yes. But more honestly, with myself.

That’s the root of the Warrior in me.

I sacrificed relationships along the way. I chose snowboarding over love, over family, not because I didn’t value those things, but because I didn’t yet believe I could hold them and still belong. I know guides who have balanced their careers and family life gracefully. I wasn’t one of them for a long time.

That changed when I met my wife.

She understands this lifestyle because she has lived it herself. She doesn’t romanticize it, but she respects it. She sees my passion and encourages growth, not excess. She steadies me. She’s a unicorn, and we make each other better.

We also chose to leave Jackson. Things changed. I changed. We moved to Central Idaho, smaller, quieter, a place where the snowpack demands humility every single season. The guiding there was fun, but the snowpack was complex and sometimes lacking. I began teaching more avalanche classes, spending more time explaining patterns instead of constantly testing them.

That work mattered to me.

Teaching forced me to slow down, to articulate why decisions worked instead of just making them. It sharpened my thinking. It made me more patient. It allowed the Magician to show up.

This is where I found language for something I had felt long before I could name it.

Carl Jung was a psychologist who believed that over a lifetime we move through different archetypal roles, not as titles, but as ways of orienting ourselves to the world. The Warrior is about proving, protecting, and enduring. The Magician is about understanding, translating experience, and teaching. The King is about stewardship, creating stability and continuity so others can thrive. Jung also warned that each role has a Shadow, parts of ourselves that can quietly take over if we don’t acknowledge them.

I could see myself clearly in that framework.

The Magician had begun to emerge, but I wasn’t ready to let go of the Warrior.

On a slow start to winter in Stanley, I left and went to Alaska in December. Alaska was having a record year. I stayed. I guided. Doors opened. I was welcomed back. My phone rang. Offers were made. Contracts were signed. I joked that the heli-ski world was like that line from Godfather III: Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

But that joke isn’t quite honest.

No one pulled me back. I chose to return.

I’ve learned that it’s possible to carry more than one role at a time. To teach and still lead. To explain patterns and still step into consequence. To let the Magician speak without silencing the Warrior, while trusting that the King will arrive when the work calls for him, not before.

For now, I find myself here in Japan, guiding heli skiing.

The client is here too.

Not as a comparison or a contrast, but as another person whose life brought him to the same place on the same day. Different stories. Different paths. Same mountain. Same helicopter.

The only real difference is that once we strap in, I’m the one who gets first tracks.

I’ve spent most of my adult life moving through mountains, guiding, forecasting, teaching avalanche courses, working safety for film productions, and doing the kind of day-in, day-out fieldwork that doesn’t make the ski films or magazines. Over all these years, across different snow climates and different crews, one truth keeps rising to the surface: good decision-making in the mountains lives where the science and the soul overlap.

The Science is the easy part to explain. It’s snow profiles, temperature gradients, storm cycles, wind events, reading terrain, weak layers, instabilities, and the patterns we learn through repetition. It’s the stuff we can quantify, chart, measure, and pass on to students. It lives in notebooks, in weather models, in avalanche problems, in the moments when you dig a pit and see the whole season stacked right there in front of you.

The Soul, that’s different. That’s something earned. It shows up in the way you move through terrain, the pace you keep, the days you walk away, the people you trust, and the silence you hold when something doesn’t sit right. It’s built from years of paying attention when the consequences get real. And it’s built from the people we’ve lost, the close calls we don’t forget, and the mornings we step out the door knowing full well that the mountain always has the final say.

When I started guiding, I thought I understood this balance. I had the energy, the fitness, the skill, and what I thought was good judgment. But like most people early in their career, my confidence curve was ahead of my experience curve. I was strong enough to get into places I wasn’t wise enough to manage well yet. That’s the dangerous stage, the one where everything seems to confirm you’re making good decisions simply because nothing bad has happened yet.

It was a slow accumulation of moments, small mistakes, weather surprises, weird snowpacks, tense days with clients, and nights lying awake replaying decisions I’d made that didn’t sit right. One of those moments was getting caught in an avalanche that came far closer to ending things than I ever admitted at the time, a reminder that even one misread layer can change everything. Those lessons started to build a kind of quiet caution in me. Not fear, just clarity. I realized I was more interested in a long career than a bold one, more interested in longevity than big days, and more committed to people going home than riding the line.

As the years went by, I worked alongside athletes, guides, and film crews who helped reinforce those lessons. Some of those people shaped my thinking profoundly, people who had survived things they shouldn’t have, people who carried scars they didn’t talk about, and a few people who simply had a calm, grounded way of moving in the mountains that I wanted to emulate.

For years, I had the rare privilege of sitting between two incredibly accomplished guides during our guide meetings at a helicopter guiding operation in Alaska, each representing opposite ends of the spectrum between science and soul. Don Sharaf embodied the science for me. His command of snowpack mechanics, his precision with language, and his ability to articulate complex avalanche problems with clarity set the standard for what professional rigor looks like in this field. His résumé in avalanche education and snow science is beyond compare, but more importantly, he brought a discipline that demanded we slow down, justify our decisions, and remain accountable to the data, even when it was inconvenient. Being around Don sharpened my thinking and forced me to back every instinct with evidence.

On the other side of me sat Jeff Zell, a product of an older school of guiding, shaped by decades of lived experience rather than formal models. Jeff carried a quiet confidence that came from having seen almost everything at least once. His decisions were rooted in feel, timing, and an intuitive sense of the mountains that couldn’t always be explained with charts or terminology. He had an ability not only to walk away when something didn’t feel right, but also to go for it when the day truly opened up, recognizing those rare moments when conditions, timing, and energy aligned. I watched him make calls that looked conservative one day and boldly opportunistic the next, always guided by the same internal compass.

I realized that despite these two vastly different approaches, they often arrived at the same conclusions. One came through analysis, the other through intuition, but both were deeply grounded in respect for the mountains and a commitment to bringing everyone home. Sitting between them, season after season, gave me a front-row seat to what balance really looks like. I was incredibly fortunate to absorb lessons from both, and over time, to blend their influence into my own guiding, using science to inform my decisions and soul to know when to pause, wait, or step forward. That balance has become the foundation of how I move through the mountains, and it’s one I continue to refine with every season.

Jeremy Jones is another one of those voices in my world, not because of the big lines he’s ridden, but because of the way he talks about patience, intuition, and that inner signal that says “not today.” His book “The Art of Shralpinism” puts language to something I’ve felt my whole career: the ability to wait, to listen, to let the mountains dictate the pace and the objectives.

In our world, patience isn’t passive. It’s strategic. It’s a survival skill. It’s what makes a long life in the mountains possible.

I’ve seen this over and over in my own guiding. The best decisions I’ve ever made were the ones that didn’t feel heroic at all at the time, turning around early, backing off a slope that looked fine, waiting an extra hour for the light to change, or slowing down a group that was unknowingly outrunning their judgment. Those moments don’t make for great stories, but they make for great seasons. They build trust, consistency, and experience you can count on.

The more I teach and work with young riders, the more convinced I am that the hardest skill to learn is honest humility. Not fake humility. Not the kind people post about online. The real kind, the humility to accept that the mountain does not care how good you are, how badly you want something, or how well yesterday went. It only cares about today’s conditions, today’s timing, today’s energy, and the decisions you make right now.

That’s where the soul side of this work lives. Not in the romance of big lines or perfect snow, but in the discipline, it takes to stay conservative when your ego, your crew, or your timeline is trying to pull you in the opposite direction. In my role guiding and working safety for film productions, I see this dynamic constantly. Cameras turn on, and the pressure goes up. Athletes know the window is small. Producers want efficiency. Pilots want clarity. Everyone wants success.

But the mountain doesn’t care about any of that.

That’s why I’ve built my entire approach around slowing things down, building clear communication, creating simple shared frameworks, and encouraging teams to speak up early and often. Moving too fast is when things start to slip: transitions get sloppy, assumptions go unspoken, marginal terrain starts to look acceptable, and small red flags get brushed aside. Speed kills judgment.

When you slow the pace, everything improves, observations, communication, transitions, the quality of decision-making, and the ability to sense when something isn’t right.

There are the days when the mountain gives you the green light. The air softens, the mountain exhales, the wind releases its grip, and the terrain feels welcoming rather than wary. The crew moves as one, communication is unspoken, pacing is effortless, and the energy is calm but alert. Decisions don’t feel made so much as revealed, arising from patience rather than push. These days carry a different quality, cleaner, lighter, almost generous. We remember these days not because we took something from the mountains, but because we waited, listened, and received the gift the mountains were willing to give.

If there’s one thing I want athletes, guides, and producers to take away from the message of the Science and the Soul, it’s this: longevity is the real measure of mastery. Not how steep you rode. Not how many film segments you stacked. Not how many certifications you collected. Mastery is being able to show up year after year, healthy, grounded, humble, and still learning.

Science gives us the framework. Soul gives us the wisdom.

Together, they give us the long game.

So, I began by talking with the people around me—athletes, guides, production crews, friends I’d shared mountains and rivers and years of work with. I asked them what they carried, what weighed on them, what patterns they noticed in themselves. The response was overwhelming. After days of listening to people I cared about open up in ways I’d never heard before, I had to step away. What I realized, very quickly, is that empathy is not a lightweight responsibility. Holding space for people requires skill, training, and boundaries—none of which I have. I am a snowboarder not a therapist.

As I continued digging in, I was introduced to some practical tools designed to make conversations about mental health more accessible in high-stress professions. One that resonated immediately was the Stress Continuum—a simple color-coded framework that helps people identify where they’re at mentally and communicate that to their team. Being a snow nerd, I couldn’t help but notice how closely it mirrors the North American Public Avalanche Danger Scale.

That connection opened a door for me. I spend countless hours digging into the snowpack, studying layers, understanding the invisible forces that create stability or instability. Yet I had spent almost no time digging into my own internal layers. That’s where my first analogy was born. We are like a snowpack. And others soon followed:

Are you well-adjusted like a strong maritime snowpack? Do you struggle when a rapid-loading event hits? Or are you more like a continental snowpack—carrying deeply buried persistent weak layers that can shape your whole season?

These analogies helped unlock conversations with a lot of people in snow and mountain communities. It gave us language and imagery we already understood, and it created space for us to talk about their inner landscape with the same honesty and curiosity we bring to the mountains. And for the first time, I felt like we were genuinely making progress, acknowledging past and present stress, talking openly, and learning how to support ourselves and each other.

The work we were doing as an industry was groundbreaking—but at the same time, I started noticing a pattern that wasn’t serving us well. All seasonal mountain work comes with real mental load. Long hours, long seasons, high housing costs, tourist-town pressure, inconsistent snow years, illness, winter commuting, these things stack up quietly. Burnout in mountain towns is real, and I’ve always tried to finish a season with the same excitement I had on day one. That’s not easy.

We’ve all seen it: the liftie in December, fired up and talking to every guest, who by late March barely notices you before the chairlift clips you in the back. That’s mental fatigue—and none of us are immune. Even guiding heli-skiing, which looks glamorous from the outside, wears you down. By late April, I’m ready for home just like everyone else.

In the ski industry, we walk a tightrope—high passion, thin margins, and constant staffing challenges. It has become more acceptable to acknowledge mental wellness, and that’s a big step forward. But taking time off only works if we’re intentional with it, if we actually use that time to recover, regroup, and rebuild capacity.

So how do we do that? By treating mental wellness the same way we treat physical readiness: as a form of Mental Fitness.

When I first started talking about mental health, my focus—like much of society’s—was on trauma and mental illness. These are real issues that deserve attention, and they should never be pushed into the shadows. Our industry has made real progress in offering resources, and our community has become far more accepting of people asking for help.

Now bear with me as I step into another analogy. Think about mental fitness the same way we think about physical fitness.

When you suffer a physical injury or illness, you go see a professional. You get evaluated, you follow a treatment plan, maybe you do physical therapy, maybe you take medication. Mental trauma and mental illness deserve that same level of professional care, and thankfully, seeking support is becoming more normalized.

But here’s the part we often overlook: physical health isn’t only about treatment—it’s about prevention. We train our bodies to handle stress. We stretch, we strengthen, we rest, we fuel ourselves. We don’t wait for an ACL tear to start caring about our legs. We build capacity so we can move through the world with more resilience.

Mental fitness works the same way.

If we only address mental health when something breaks, we’re missing the entire foundation. Just like your body needs conditioning to handle long days on the skin track or heavy packs in the alpine, your mind needs regular conditioning to handle uncertainty, stress, decision-making, interpersonal friction, and the emotional load of the environments we work in.

Physical fitness has its tools; strength training, cardio, mobility, nutrition, sleep. Mental fitness does too; reflection, boundaries, time off, healthy routines, connection, mindfulness, purpose, communication, and knowing when to ask for help.

So, I want to propose this: if we want to be truly resilient in our work and in our lives, we need to invest at least as much energy in mental conditioning as we do in physical conditioning. Maybe even more. Because while a strong body carries you up the mountain, a strong mind brings you home safely.

This winter, while working in Alaska and camped on a glacier deep in the mountains, I received news of a tragic heli-skiing accident in Canada that took the lives of several respected members of the ski and snowboard community—including a friend of mine. Just prior to that, another large avalanche had claimed the lives of three heli-ski clients in a different part of Alaska. I had been based in that same town earlier in the season while preparing for a remote expedition, and the emotional weight of these back-to-back accidents sat heavily with me.

At the time, I was serving as the safety lead for a major televised ski competition, responsible for the safety of the athletes and crew. I spent three weeks on that glacier, and after we successfully pulled off one of the most impressive events, I’ve ever been part of, I immediately transitioned to another project in Valdez, this time filming a ski segment for a production crew I’ve worked with for many years. They’re like family to me; I train with them every winter and know exactly how each person operates. But familiarity doesn’t change the fact that weather and snowpack call the shots. And this April, Alaska was delivering some of the most difficult conditions I’ve seen: nearly nonstop storms, almost no high-pressure windows, and an unusually weak snowpack that made terrain selection a daily challenge. Somehow, we still managed to capture a strong film segment.

Just as that wrapped, I was asked to take on another safety role for a project involving speed-flying and skiing in the same run. As if managing ski terrain wasn’t enough, now the athletes would be launching from steep, glaciated features that weren’t skiable to begin with and flying over them. The plan was to shoot in one coastal range, but with a massive storm building, the entire crew had to relocate halfway across the state. For two brief days we stayed ahead of the weather, and I found myself watching these athletes thread their way through hanging glaciers in a way that left me both amazed and terrified. If something went wrong, extraction would have been nearly impossible. This was well beyond my comfort zone, and my end-of-season stress was maxed out.

When weather and avalanche danger began rising again, we were pushed even farther inland—back toward the same mountain range where my season had begun eight weeks earlier. The combination of avalanche hazard, poor visibility, cloud cover, complex logistics for a team of nearly twenty people, remote fuel planning for aircraft, the pressure to “get the shot,” and the accumulated fatigue of a long season finally hit me on our last day of filming. A less mentally fit version of myself would have blown up at the producer who kept pushing my team, in no way do I fault the producer this is his job and he was under even more pressure than me Thankfully I managed to hold it together, thanks to some strategic walks away from the group and a few surprisingly effective breathing techniques. We got the shot. We got everyone out safely before the storm and before the fuel ran dry. And somehow, I got through another Alaska heli season.

I found myself asking: How did I get through this season? The truth is, I was leaning on every mental fitness tool I had just to get through the final stretch. Falling apart wasn’t an option, not on the glacier, not in the helicopter hangar, not in front of the people relying on me. I turned to the mental fitness tools that years of navigating high-stress mountain environments had shown me were the only things that truly work for me. I know how important sleep is to mental fitness, and I fought hard for every hour I could get, doing whatever it took to guarantee real rest. I moved my body every single day, sometimes a skin track, sometimes a limping run on a bad ankle in the rain, because motion was the best thing that kept the stress from consuming me. I meditated when I had the space, breathed with intention when I didn’t, and used yoga to reconnect with a body that felt more like a piece of equipment than a home. I carved out tiny pockets of solitude just to catch my breath, and I kept myself tethered to my wife, the person who matters most to me, through late-night check-ins, quick texts, FaceTime calls and emails from thousands of miles away. None of these things were heroic. They weren’t even particularly graceful. But they were the tools that kept me held together, and without them, I don’t think I would have reached the end of the season intact enough to face the hardest part: returning home.

Those tools carried me through the mountains, but reentry was the moment when everything I’d been holding back finally caught up with me. I flew home to my wife, only to learn that a memorial for my friend was being held the very next day. During the chaos of the season, I hadn’t truly processed his death. Being confronted with the grief of his spouse, seeing the reality of that loss up close, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever witnessed. My wife and I have always understood the risks of my career, but understanding risk in theory is very different from seeing someone you know living through that kind of loss. The emotional weight of that realization hit me hard. Everything I’d been holding inside all season finally broke open. I completely unraveled that night. I managed to leave before fully losing it in public, and the next morning I drove home in silence.

For days afterward, I barely spoke. I sat on the couch, watched baseball, and ate popcorn. In the past, I would’ve numbed myself with alcohol or thrown myself back into work. But over the past few years I’ve learned what I actually need when I hit that kind of low point. I packed a tent, stove, sleeping bag, and my splitboard, and headed into the mountains alone. After months of constant decision-making and human interaction in a high-responsibility role, solitude is the only thing that lets me reset. Being responsible for no one but myself gives me room to breathe.

When I got home, I made some changes. I bought a new mountain bike, nothing gets you moving like a new bike. I cleaned up my eating after months of Seven Eleven food and Valdez bar menus. I reminded myself how good vegetables can be. I meditated on the skin track. I did yoga every day. I journaled. I began writing essays about my life. I went to therapy. I lifted weights in my garage. I also reached out to friends in the industry who’d had tough seasons of their own, and we had real conversations—ones that helped both of us.

 And most importantly, I had coffee with my wife every morning.

 I guided a river trip in early June. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to work yet, but it was a familiar group of longtime clients, and being on the river with good people is healing in a way not much else is. Later that month, I traveled to go snowboarding (in June) to celebrate a close friend’s milestone birthday. We used the Jackson Hole Aerial Tram to access Cody Peak. Riding the tram in summer with a snowboard always gets attention, sometimes the kind of attention you’re not mentally equipped for. In past years, I would’ve dreaded interacting with tourists, knowing I didn’t have the mental bandwidth for curious strangers. But this time was different. I was present. I was engaged in a meaningful conversation with a friend who I had worked in Alaska with this season, we were discussing Re-Entry, when a very touristy family from out of state approached us with a handful of innocent but amusing questions. Instead of shutting down, I shifted into guide mode and happily explained what we were doing and how snow can exist above freezing temperatures. By the end of the tram ride, we had them singing Happy Birthday to my friend. When we stepped out at the top, my buddy whom I had been discussing Re-Entry looked at me and said, “Well, I guess you’ve sufficiently re-entered.” And he was right. I had—because I’d done the work.

High-stress work carves itself into us. It shapes how we see the world, how we move through it, and how we show up for the people beside us. We train our bodies for this work because we know the mountains demand strength—but the truth is, they demand even more from our minds. No one would hike into consequential terrain with a blown knee and call it readiness; yet we often step into equally consequential mental terrain without tending to the injuries we’ve accumulated along the way.

And this isn’t just about guiding or avalanche terrain. Anyone who works a full season in a ski town—guides, patrollers, cooks, bartenders, lifties, shop employees, front-desk crews—knows how quickly long hours, stressed guests, thin margins, bad snow years, housing instability, and the relentless pace can wear a person down. Service-industry work in mountain towns carries its own version of exposure, and it demands its own form of resilience.

Mental fitness is the quiet discipline that keeps us steady when everything around us is moving. It’s what keeps us sharp, compassionate, patient, and capable in the moments that matter most—both on the mountain and far from it. If we want long careers, long seasons, and full lives, we have to train our minds with the same commitment we bring to our craft.

The mountains will always challenge us, but they also offer the immense rewards that keep drawing us back, the clarity, the purpose, the rooster tails, the quiet magic of living close to something bigger than ourselves. Mental fitness is how we rise to meet those moments, season after season. And in the end, that’s why we choose this life. To me, it’s worth it

I moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in 1994. I was 22 years old and had spent a few seasons working as a snowboard instructor back East, I was convinced I was ready for the big leagues. The “research” I did before uprooting my life amounted to reading two magazine articles. One ranked Jackson Hole as the most “extreme” terrain in the country—Alaska wasn’t even on that magazine’s radar yet. The other profiled the Jackson Hole Air Force, that infamous crew of misfits and renegades who ducked ropes in search of powder and radical terrain.

This was where I wanted to ride, and those were the people I wanted to ride with.

My first day on the mountain was an eye-opener. Because of my prior teaching experience, I came in as a “qualified new hire,” which meant I skipped the stress of the hiring clinic and was thrown straight into the returning-instructor training. These men and women were some of the best snowboarders I had ever seen—legends with an intimate understanding of the mountain. And 1994 wasn’t a gentle introduction. It was a huge early season: over 100 inches of snow before opening day. I remember sitting in the old Music Festival Hall during orientation, listening to avalanche bombs echo over the mountain for the first time in my life.

Later that day I took my first Tram ride and we all offloaded at Tower 3 because the upper mountain was still too unstable. I stepped into waist-deep powder and instantly realized I was in over my head. I had never experienced snow that deep in my life—or terrain that demanded that much from me. Every time I fell, I’d fight to get back up, arms punching through snow, legs burning, lungs on fire. I was completely wiped out, physically wrecked from the effort and humiliated that I was holding the rest of my group back. Eventually, I swallowed my pride, went to my supervisor, and asked to download on the Tram—long before everyone else was finished. Riding down in that empty cabin, I honestly thought, I might never be able to ride this mountain.

But somehow, I showed up the next day. And the day after that. And the Tetons slowly started to teach me how to move in their world.

The allure of Jackson when I first arrived was the bond that existed between everyone who lived there. We were all there for the mountains. There really was no other reason to be there in the winter. It was a difficult place to live.

But that was exactly the point. Skiing and snowboarding were the most important things in our lives, and Jackson demanded that kind of devotion. The place was hard to get to and isolated — not just from the rest of America, but even from the rest of the ski and snowboard industry. If you wanted a real career in snow sports, you moved to Salt Lake, Tahoe, or Whistler to be around the scene. When you moved to Jackson, you did it for the terrain.

There was very little work as a snowboard instructor in the ’90s. Back East, I had made decent money instructing — enough to live off. In Jackson, there simply wasn’t enough work to go around. When I got hired by the snowboard school, they asked which five days I preferred working, and I confidently said weekends. My supervisor laughed and told me weekends were no different than any other day. With no big cities anywhere nearby, nobody came to Jackson for a quick weekend. You either lived there, or you didn’t.

Back then, the Tram clock tower had two flags — one red and one green. Red meant new snow had fallen overnight and no early employee Tram. Green meant no new snow, and the 8:24 a.m. employees-only Tram was loading.

As instructors, we didn’t have to report to group lesson lineup until 9:50, so a green-flag morning meant one perfect run before work — if you hustled. on this early tam I learned many lessons. One of the first big lessons was Corbett’s Couloir. My first attempts were ugly — survival turns, bad landings, and more flailing than I’d care to admit. But like everything in Jackson, you learned by doing it again and again. Eventually the line started to make sense, and I could ride it with the confidence and the style it demanded. That was Jackson’s way of teaching you: nothing was given, everything was earned.

 Those early laps, combined with long days teaching beginners and then riding again after lessons, were a rhythm that shaped all of us. It was a system built around hunger, effort, and showing up.

I continued working as a snowboard instructor and had plenty of time to freeride this incredible mountain. One huge perk of being in the snowboard school was the training clinics—sessions where the more experienced instructors would break down technique, give us personal pointers, and push us to get better. I credit those clinics as some of the most valuable learning opportunities of my entire career.

As my skills progressed, I started hearing whispers about the forbidden terrain beyond the resort boundaries. That backcountry became my obsession. Riding out there was still very illegal, but I began to pick up the quiet tricks of poaching—when to go, how to move, what lines to take, to wear a white hat and to carry a white trash bag I could easily deploy for camouflage, if necessary, where to re-enter the resort unseen. To this day, I was never caught, though I had a few very close calls.

Back then, the people who lived in Jackson in the winter were a different breed. We were broke, crammed into tiny rooms, and drinking cheap beer in the downstairs bar everyone just called the Pub. But none of that mattered — we were too busy learning to ride some of the best terrain in the country. The mountain demanded everything: fitness, nerve, patience, respect. You earned your place by showing up in the cold, chasing storms, and helping your friends do the same. That struggle was the Jackson Hole Air Force spirit, and the day Captain Benny Wilson quietly handed me my Air Force patch on the Tram, I knew I was home.

In 1998, the powers that be—the USFS and JHMR—finally decided to allow people to enter the backcountry “at their own risk” every day of the season, removing liability from both entities. The JHMR Alpine Guides were formed to help skiers navigate the hazards that existed out there. I wasn’t hired right away, but through persistence I slowly wore the lead guide down. And when a snowboard client specifically asked for a snowboard guide, I finally got my shot. That was the beginning of my career guiding in this amazing terrain.

The Alpine Guide Service exploded, and for a few golden years we were running full throttle. We had ten guides working full-time, taking guests onto Cody Peak, Four Pines, Rock Springs, and all the classic Jackson lines—Spacewalk, Zero G, No Shadows, Four Shadows, Once Is Enough, Twice Is Nice, Pucker Face. For a while, we were the tip of the spear, showing people the terrain that shaped us.

I met my wife in Jackson. She moved there planning to work just one summer — but like so many people, once she felt the place, she decided to stay. A long-time client of mine introduced us. He told me he was tired of me dragging a different “scallywag” into the nicest restaurants in town every time he invited me to dinner. He said it half-joking, half-serious — and then insisted he had someone I needed to meet. Turns out he was right. That introduction changed the entire trajectory of my life.

Those years—those people—were the heart of Jackson for me. The 6 a.m. parking-lot conversations. The friends who became family. The mentors who pulled me aside when I needed it. It wasn’t the steep terrain or the mythology of the Air Force that kept me there. It was the community. A shared willingness to suffer, to commit, to show up for something bigger than yourself.

Then the changes came.

They didn’t arrive all at once. They crept quietly at first. The year the Four Seasons Hotel opened, Corbett’s naturally formed an easier entrance. Locals immediately called it the Four Seasons entrance, mocking the new clientele. Slowly, the town’s priorities shifted. Eventually, lunch reservations mattered more than where we rode. At the same time, the corporate structure at the resort tightened. The rules got heavier. The freedom we once had as guides narrowed. Little things started adding up in ways that didn’t sit right.

One of the biggest shifts came when the resort opened the Early Tram to the public. Clients could now pay a lot of money to access it, but employees who weren’t scheduled to work could no longer ride it. On paper, it was just a policy change. In reality, it was cultural. It was symbolic. Jackson was becoming something different than the place we had given our youth to. We were no longer the tip of the spear. We were the feathers—still part of the arrow, still moving fast, but no longer leading the way.

The Day I Knew It Was Time to Leave

I remember the exact day I decided to leave Jackson. A bluebird, 18-inch powder day—the kind you dream about all summer. I was scheduled to guide on the Early Tram with a long-time client I genuinely enjoyed. It should have been perfect. But when I got home that evening, all I could do was complain—about the traffic, the lift lines even on the ski school side, the frustration of having our guiding hands tied by management. I had just spent a dream day on my favorite mountain, and all I felt was irritation. My wife looked at me and said, “You’re standing in front of the tunnel yelling at the train.” She was right. Change had come whether I liked it or not.

What Jackson Still Means to Me

Even now, decades later, I feel the pull—not to move back, not to reclaim something, but to honor what shaped me. Jackson gave me my foundation: early guiding, snowpack knowledge, risk, humility, friendships, mistakes, storms, and laughter. It taught me that mountains don’t care who you think you are. They teach you on their own terms. The Jackson I knew is gone. But the version of me that was built there is still here.

Somehow, in ways I didn’t understand at the time, two magazine articles and a dream were enough to build the life I have now.

Life After Jackson

My wife and I eventually moved to a tiny mountain town in central Idaho — a place with sixty-eight permanent residents, a beautiful mountain range out the back door, and a majestic river running straight through the middle of town. Looking back, I think this is the place I was dreaming of when I was a young man driving across the country toward Jackson for the first time. I just didn’t know it yet.

Now I feel like I have the best of both worlds. I absolutely love going back to visit Jackson — to see my friends, to stand among the mountains and rivers that shaped me, to reconnect with the version of myself that was forged there. And because I’m no longer burdened by the petty nuances of everyday life in Jackson, I can really enjoy my time when I’m there. I get the joy of the place without the weight of it. And when the crowds start to bother me, I simply get to leave and return to the quiet valley I now call home.

In the end, Jackson shaped me, released me, and somehow still welcomes me back as the person it helped me become.

By Jamie Weeks

I first met Sam Collins in 2008. He had just moved to Jackson and hired me for a day of snowboarding in the backcountry at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. Every time I’m booked with a new client, I start with the required safety briefing — time that also lets me size them up a bit, learn who they are, and quietly gauge what kind of day we’re likely to have.

It didn’t take long to realize that Sam wasn’t looking for a single day of guided touring. His real goal was to learn where he could safely go on his own. He wanted me to show him my favorite zones — and I could tell immediately that once he saw them, he’d be riding those lines every chance he got. And that’s exactly what he did.

Sam was well within his rights. He paid for knowledge, and I was there to share it. My job as a guide is to give people the best experience possible while helping them understand how to enjoy the mountains safely. Some guides might hold back, steering guests away from the best spots to protect their “secret stashes.” I’ve never been able to do that. If a client has the skill, fitness, and conditions allow, I give them the best the day has to offer. That’s always been my ethic. I am no Saint I ride these lines usually because they are the best of what is available that day and honestly that is where I selfishly want to ride.

So, that first day, I took Sam to a few of my tried-and-true crowd-pleasers — the terrain that shows off why I love this place. After that, I started seeing him everywhere: on the tram, at the top of the bootpack, even in Corbett’s Cabin when I ducked in for a quick piss. Every time, he’d find me, grinning, and ask, “Where’s the good snow today?”

You can imagine my dilemma,never have I experienced a client as motivated as Sam it was relentless. Sam was out there every single day, obsessed, determined, and endlessly curious. He’d appear at every gate, every lift, every trailhead, hungry for beta. Eventually, I realized the only way to shake him was to make him understand that information has value — that if he wanted more, he’d have to hire me again or simply leave me alone.

I’m from New York, so I don’t have a hard time saying what I think. The next time I saw him, I told him straight. I figured that would be the end of it. Instead, Sam booked me the very next day.

What I didn’t know then was that Sam had also lived in Brooklyn after growing up in the Pacific Northwest. He spoke my language — direct, fast-paced, no nonsense — and he respected it. That second day, I decided to spend more time figuring out who this guy was.

Sam and his wife, Karen, had both worked in finance for 26 years while raising their three kids — Kiersten, Brendan, and Stephanie — in a brownstone in Brooklyn. When the opportunity came to sell the house and move to the mountains, they jumped. Like me and so many others, they came for the reasons we all stay: the mountains, the rivers, the community.

Sam threw himself into snowboarding the way he approached everything — with full-throttle enthusiasm. When he moved to Wyoming, he didn’t even have a driver’s license. (Who needs a car in New York City?) He passed the driver’s test, bought a lime-green Mustang, and attacked his new life the same way he attacked every mountain: all in.

If he could see it from  the top of the tram, he wanted to snowboard it. And over the years, he did. He’d call me with objectives, wait patiently for the right conditions, and when things lined up, we’d go after it. Sometimes the mountains gave us the green light, sometimes they didn’t. Sam learned quickly that the mountain and the weather, not the guide, makes the decisions.

He was ambitious but cautious — always thinking about safety, especially when one of his kids came along. Those days often became avalanche lessons as much as riding missions.

In 2012, Sam’s son Brendan asked for a trip to Valdez, Alaska, as his high-school graduation present. Sam was happy to oblige — on one condition: he was coming too. Most guests are lucky if they get through their package of 36 runs in 7 days when they go heli-skiing in Alaska. Weather, snow conditions, and tired legs often force the guests a few “down days.” I have been a heli guide in Alaska since 2001, and the week that Brendan and Sam came to Alaska is easily the absolute best week of weather and conditions I have ever seen. Sam and Brendan plowed through their 36-run package, and Sam quickly realized the extra run policy was significantly in his favor, so they continued to rack up runs totaling 57 runs in one week. The extra run policy for the heli operation was amended the next season, and we called it the “Sam Clause.” During that week we snowboarded a run Called “Elephant” and one of my coworkers Jed Workman took an amazing shot of me riding with Sam and Brendan waiting their turn in the background.  Yo this day it is my absolute favorite photo of snowboarding in Alaska

As Sam spent more time in the Tetons, he wanted to go deeper. He signed up for a splitboarding course I taught in Grand Teton National Park. The uphill didn’t come naturally to him — but he was a road cyclist, and he knew how to suffer. His pace was slow and steady; his endurance, unshakable. Sam was also a prolific sweater, and on warm days, he’d shed layers with abandon, often to the dismay of all the skiers passing us on the skin track. Out of that came yet another “Sam Clause”: at least one layer must remain on at all times.

The more I got to know Sam, the more respect I had for him — for how he approached snowboarding, life, and family. Out of that mutual respect, we became real friends.

One afternoon in the off season, I stopped by his house to pick up a set of weights he was giving me for my home gym — I still use them today. He pointed out the window at the Tetons, with Albright Peak dominating the skyline, and he asked me if it was rideable for him. I told him on the spot that we were going to snowboard it.

For me, the hardest runs to forget are the ones I haven’t done. Every time I pass them — on the tram over Corbett’s Couloir, driving home from Togwotee past Mt. Moran, or driving down into Valdez with Meteorite in view — they burn into my brain until I finally ride them. This is referred to as Mind Surfing. For some people finding runs and visualizing themselves riding them is the fun but to me the joy of Mind Surfing comes after riding the run and reliving the turns every time I look back at it. I recognized that same fire in Sam. We made a plan to climb and ride Albright that spring. His daughter Stephanie joined us.

Anyone who’s been up Wimpy’s knows how slick and steep that skin track gets. This makes for tiring work and by the time we reached Wimpy’s false summit, Stephanie was done. With another 500 vertical feet to go to summit Albright proper and daylight fading, we considered turning back. But Sam wasn’t finished. Neither was I. We pushed on to the summit together.

Sam and I shared a special moment on top, one that I believe changed us both for the better. I’ve ridden Albright plenty of times, sometimes in better snow, but never with more meaning. Sam’s initial goal that day might have been to snowboard the peak — but the deeper goal, the one I think he truly achieved, was finding a better life for himself and his family here in the mountains.

That run was the last I ever shared with Sam Collins. On July 9th, 2018, Sam died in a motorcycle accident on Pine Creek Pass. He was 63. He lived an extraordinary life — full, curious, and passionate. Sam learned a lot from me about snowboarding, but I learned much more from him about living.

Guides often say they chose this life because it lets them make a living doing what they love in the places they love. That’s true for me too. But over the years, I’ve realized guiding gives you more than that — if you’re lucky. Every now and then, one of those clients — one of the people you meet on a random morning, the ones who test your patience, push your limits, and keep showing up — might just turn out to be your guide.

I recently had surgery on my left ankle. During recovery, I was often asked “What happened?” Not wanting to go too deep into all the details, I would simply tell the random acquaintances who asked that I just had some repair work done on an old injury. Which in itself is technically true, but the real story takes more time and depth than most people want to hear while waiting in line at the Post Office. In our fast-paced society, it is common for people to greet each other with the phrase “How are you?” but do they really want to know how you really are? So thankfully there is a platform to allow me to tell the whole story.

Over the years, as my snow science skills developed, I learned, and as any avalanche professional will tell you; the more you know about snow, the more you realize how little you actually know about snow. With all the science that goes into making informed, educated decisions regarding the snowpack, there is still an element of something else. Call it what you like—luck, fate, faith, superstition, or karma—they all play a role in the mountains. Recognizing that this element was beyond my control, I began looking for ways to overcome it. Consistency and repetition became my tools; if I were successful one day, I would repeat everything I did that day the next time I went out. Some people would call it obsessive compulsive, but if I put my left boot on first on a day when I felt I was pretty damn lucky to make it home, you can bet your ass I would put my left boot on first every day after that. Requiring this kind of consistency in my daily routine can be quite a challenge as gear wears out. I’m pretty tough on gear, so I have accepted that there will be new pieces from time to time (but never more than one new piece of gear per day), and the only piece of gear that had remained a constant in my life was my white hat.

In 1999 one of the very first pieces of swag I received from K2 Snowboards was a white fleece hat. I wore this hat proudly for many years. I snowboarded many big lines wearing that hat. From Jackson to Alaska to New Zealand to Idaho, this hat was with me. It even became an important piece of my wardrobe in the summer months. When guiding whitewater trips, a good warm hat is useful while cooking breakfast for the guests at 6:00am. So, this hat then traveled with me through the rapids of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon, and West Virginia’s mighty Gauley River. For years this hat was with me through many precarious situations, and while I escaped these adventures relatively unscathed, my hat was taking a beating. My 8th grade Home Economics sewing skills prolonged its tour of duty, but by the winter of 2007 I was forced to retire my white hat.

I easily found another white hat to replace the original, but not really trusting this new hat, I carried my old white hat in my jacket pocket while riding. The winter of 2007 I was dividing my time between guiding at the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort and working as lead guide for Togwotee SnowCat Adventures. January 9th, 2007, I worked at JHMR, the next day I had to be up at the Togwotee Lodge at 7:00am to guide a group. Transferring all the necessary gear to guide from one place to another can be challenging, and occasionally something gets left behind. I had my new white hat, but my old white hat rested comfortably in my jacket pocket back at the ski resort.

The snowpack in Togwotee is Continental: thin, cold, and unstable. Over many years, I have become familiar with this snowpack and very familiar with the terrain on Angle Mountain. On this day I was thrown a curveball by the wind. The predominate wind direction is South West, but in the days leading up to January 10th we were pounded by North West winds.

We started off our day on a simple warm up run, and then headed over to a crowd pleaser called Box Lunch. Brendan Cronin and I, working together, decided he would ski Box Lunch with the clients, then Brendan would set up in a safe spot on the ridge and maintain visual contact with me while I would asses a run called 9755 to get some info on what the wind did over there. I have been able to initiate small avalanches on 9755 many times in the past. There is a big convexity on top of this run that usually fails on a cut from above. With Brendan watching, I dropped in, no result on my cut, hard wind slab under my board. I cut across the slope again, nothing. Getting lower into the run and running out of islands of safety, I was committed to the run. Then I felt the snow change from rock hard wind slab to super soft rotten snow. I looked to Brendan on the ridge and told him what I felt, and I was about to stop and get out my shovel to dig a pit, when I saw the entire piece of wind slab break above me. The slope above me fractured 90 cm deep and 40m wide. The wind had created a hard slab that was now cracking like an egg shell and breaking up and moving downhill around me. I knew the run well enough to know there was a deep terrain trap below me, I did not want to end up where this avalanche was going, it would not be survivable. I tried to steer my snowboard towards the ridgeline but was quickly swept off my feet. My snowboard was downhill and out in front of me. Riding the avalanche down, I felt like I was swimming through a class five rapid on a river, I was on my back facing downstream and steering with my arms. I knew I didn’t want to be in the bottom of this gulley, so I steered towards a tree and hit it squarely with my board right between my feet. The tree stopped me, but the avalanche kept going, covering my head, pushing against my back, forcing me tightly into the tree, and finally going past me. The avalanche left me partially buried with my head, shoulders, and arms above the snow but wedged against the tree. I radioed Brendan to let him know I was all right, but looking at the way I was wrapped around the tree I told him I thought my leg was broken. While digging myself out from the tree, I realized my snowboard was broken in half between the bindings, and one of the bindings had ripped off the board and was still attached to my boot. The contortion of my leg while it was buried under the snow would not have been humanly possible if my foot was still attached to the board. The more I dug myself out the better I felt about my situation. I told Brendan it was not as bad as I had originally thought and he should move the clients down to the snowcat. I radioed our base station and asked for another board to be delivered to the road. My adrenaline-fueled thought process was that I would sled down on my broken board as far as gravity would allow, then proceed to post hole in waist deep snow out to the highway to get a new board and meet the cat after they go do one more run. This all went according to plan, but when I met our office manager at the road, I knew by the look on her face that something else was wrong. In all the excitement and the amount of adrenaline pumping through my veins, I didn’t even realize I had a four-inch laceration in my forehead. I guess more than just my board hit that tree. My new hat had absorbed most of the blood and was no longer white. I then realized my day was done. Brendan skied with guests the rest of the day, and after they finished, I went to the hospital. The eighteen stiches in my forehead overshadowed my bilateral ankle pain. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I was diagnosed with a fractured talus in my right ankle, and it wasn’t until seven years later that I was diagnosed with a fractured calcaneal beak in my left ankle. This thumbnail size piece of bone floated around in my ankle joint doing seven years of damage to the ligaments and tendons to add to the damage done during the original injury. 18 years after this accident, I had surgery to repair this ankle. As I hobbled around on crutches this fall, and people ask me “What Happened?” I recalled this day and I am reminded that I am fortunate to be alive.

I made a lot of mistakes on January 10th, 2007, and as anyone who studies accidents will tell you, it is usually a combination of events that lead up to an accident. I fell victim to multiple human factors as identified by the research of Ian McCammon. My familiarity with terrain was probably my biggest mistake, not recognizing a new variable, in this case the North West wind, on a slope I had “controlled” many times before. My commitment to this particular run and the scarcity of fresh tracks prompted my desire to get this run open for the clients. I assumed the expert halo and didn’t give Brendan the opportunity to question my decision to open this slope. It’s easy to look back at this with a critical eye, hindsight is after all 20/20. The reality is I have made decisions like this many times and got away with it. Avalanche terrain is a wicked learning environment, you do not always get immediate feedback when you make bad decisions. You may get away with bad decisions for years and never have an issue. You might make good decisions and still run into big problems in the mountains. I have seen slopes with tracks on them that should have avalanched to the ground, I have seen slopes that you would never expect to avalanche, go huge. You could spend your entire life safely traveling through terrain most people would consider dangerous only to be killed walking across the street. There is something else at work here, and I cannot deny it. The fact that I believe there are other factors involved doesn’t mean I don’t use all the available resources to make my decisions. I have field books filled with data and I am always studying our weather and snowpack. On January 10, 2007, I broke some of my personal and professional protocols and paid a price for it. The injury was bad but the guides renaming the run I was avalanched on “Cankles” was worse.

Of all the mistakes I made that day, the one that weighs heaviest on me is that I did not have my White Hat with me. Would I change my decisions that day? I don’t know, but I do know that I have not been in avalanche terrain without my white hat since that day.

Adrenaline Junkie oversimplifies what is going on inside the brain of an experienced mountain or river guide. Adrenaline is part of the sympathetic nervous system’s “fight or flight” mechanism. Adrenaline is released by the adrenal glands in response to threat or sudden stress, not pleasure. Physiologically, it increases heart rate and blood pressure, restricts blood to muscles, heightens alertness, and temporarily suppresses pain and

digestion. Adrenaline is a survival chemical, not a feel-good chemical. Someone untrained in high-consequence environments, adrenaline often shows up as shaking, tunnel vision, or poor decision-making. For seasoned professionals who are conditioned to operate in these environments, adrenaline becomes a background physiological response, not the goal. A guide may still experience small bursts when things get dynamic or uncertain, but your experience allows you to regulate it, make clear decisions, and not panic.

I would be a liar if I said adrenaline did not play a role in my decision to become a guide. I was a young man in the 1990s. At that time, men in America didn’t have a war to fight, and yet we were bombarded with cultural marketing images of “Extreme” sports. Snowboarding slid into the mainstream, X Games dominated television; at one time, I even remember seeing Extreme Doritos. I was fortunate to grow up close to a ski resort in upstate New York that allowed snowboarders on its slopes. In the summer, I traveled to West Virginia to experience the whitewater rafting culture around the New River and the Gauley River.

These sports provided me with an incredible amount of adrenaline throughout my youth, and the term Adrenaline Junkie fit like a glove. My need to be on or near the “Edge” grew.

People associated this need with a death wish, but I would disagree. In my case, I needed the rush to feel alive.

My pursuit led me to the mountains of the West and eventually to Alaska. Exploring the backcountry and riding increasingly steeper and more exposed terrain while navigating avalanche hazards provided the thrill I was looking for. Adding helicopter guiding—and the volume of exposure you can achieve daily—is staggering. As my familiarity in these kinds of environments grew, the rush diminished. At the time, I did not understand this, but I now feel that a guide should not be experiencing adrenaline while guiding. If the activity you are leading others through elicits a fight-or-flight response, you are in way over your head. Put simply, a guide should not be responsible for others if your physical and mental abilities are

maxed out. Fortunately, as time progressed, I chose to satisfy my adrenaline addiction in other ways. I had seasons in which I challenged myself in the mountains without clients. Some of these missions were epic, and I truly feel I am better for pushing my limits so far. I am thankful to put these days behind me, and I truly feel as though I have found another chemical to replace adrenaline. Dopamine is part of the mesolimbic reward system. It is not about pleasure as much as it is about motivation, anticipation, and reinforcement. Dopamine spikes when you approach a challenging goal, when you achieve “flow”—where skills and challenges are balanced. Dopamine also spikes when you reflect on mastery, meaning, and control. When you feel the satisfaction of a perfect powder turn, complete a challenging but not death-defying snowboard run that you have been looking at for years, teach a great avalanche course, set a beautiful skin track, find flow on a smooth mountain bike descent, catch a trout on a fly you tied yourself, prepare a world-class meal on a river trip for your friends, or simply provide any of these experiences for someone else—that’s dopamine, not adrenaline. It’s your brain’s way of saying: This is meaningful. Keep doing this.

I feel like I have evolved from an Adrenaline Junkie (risk for intensity’s sake) to a Dopamine-Driven Practitioner (reward for mastery, connection, and flow). Guides, athletes,and rescuers who’ve matured in their field often describe this transition: When I was young, I chased chaos. Now I chase clarity. My system still lights up, not because of danger, but because the balance between risk, control, and flow is so neurologically rewarding. This blend produces deep dopaminergic satisfaction, not a spike of adrenaline.

Modern culture sometimes misunderstands people like me. Through social media, they see images of a heli drop, big exposed mountain lines, avalanche hazards, whitewater rafting carnage, and they project fear onto it. Their amygdala fires, so they assume mine must too.

But for me, these are familiar environments, finely mapped by repetition and expertise.

Where the untrained person feels adrenaline, I feel focus, flow, and mastery—a dopamine- rich, sustainable state.

Am I addicted to dopamine? I am not qualified to say. I’m just a snowboarder who barely graduated from high school. I’ve read a few books, listened to some podcasts, but I am clearly not a neuroscientist. I can tell you this: the feelings that dopamine gives me are feelings I have chased and will continue to chase my entire life.

 Every year the offices of heli ski companies throughout Alaska receive numerous resumes from highly skilled men and women who want to guide heli skiing. Every guide in the industry has at least considered guiding up here, and why not, this is the big league. The mountains of Alaska offer, by far, the best skiing in the United States. Helicopter access to the lines you’ve seen in the ski movies and a brand new lodge to come home to every night, all paint a picture of the Dream Job. And what a job it is. I never feel more like a guide than I do while working in Alaska.  Sitting in the front seat of the helicopter choosing a run, you have to make so many decisions, client ability, snow stability, snow quality, can we land here, can we get out of the helicopter there, where do we enter the run, what are my islands of safety, what is the fuel status, where are the other guides going to ski, where will the helicopter pick us up? Then get back in the helicopter and do it again. It has often been said the downhill is the easy part, and I couldn’t agree more.

 I recently had a conversation with a guide who was interested in guiding for a heli ski company in Alaska. He told me he wasn’t going to take the job because the owner wanted him to do “a lot of other work that wasn’t guide work”.  I was curious what work could they have possibly wanted him to do that wasn’t guide work? In twenty five years of guiding heli skiing I have worked every possible job you can imagine. A fair bit of those jobs actually revolved around guiding, ski tuning, base radio operator, driving vehicles, fueling helicopters, cutting alders, and delivering countless safety briefings. Guiding in Alaska is usually done at a remote lodge; this creates a special circumstance of needing all employees to help out around the base area. When not guiding I have shoveled snow, washed dishes, pumped diesel, cleaned diesel spills, shoveled snow, carried luggage, been a bouncer in the bar, shoveled snow, chipped ice, chipped dirt, and I’ve been sent on countless town errand missions which can be another adventure all in itself.

But perhaps my favorite job we have had was during the years when the lodge was closed. We had a small building at the heli pad for the clients to get prepared for the day after the drive up from town. We also supplied portable toilets for the clients at the heli pad; we referred to these toiletsas the Blue Room’s. If you have ever had the pleasure of using a portable toilet in the winter you know what a pleasant experience it can be. What you may not know is that the waste that is deposited into these toilets would freeze and forms a pyramid of pooh. This pyramid would periodically need to be knocked down to make more room. I remember vividly watching a conversation between one of our long time guides and a relatively new yet incredibly accomplished young guide. The young guide refused to do this job. He felt this wasn’t the job he was hired for. The older more experienced guide simply walked past him, grabbed a stick and said, “We all stir the Blue Room”.   

The first week of the heli ski season is all about set up and training. Most of the week I do not see the inside of a helicopter or a snowcat but I have been to our storage unit, opened about a thousand boxes, moved some of those boxes three or maybe four times, helped resurrect a van that has more lives then Stephen King’s infamous Christine, shoveled snow, somehow managed to track down all of my gear that I left here last summer, dangled off of a cliff practicing my crevasse rescue skills, shoveled snow in the mountains for helicopter landing zones and digging snow pits to evaluate the snowpack, and thousands of other menial tasks that can be more dangerous than any mountain I have ever ridden down.  One year during set up I was helping jack up a building with a small bottle jack that we had found in the back seat of car. While I watched this jack far exceed its structural weight limit, I was thinking about what all my friends back home always say to me before I leave to head to Alaska. “Be safe up there”. This has to be what they were referring to.

So, when this guide told me his possible employer wanted him to do a lot of other work that wasn’t guide work, I told him there is no way he should take that job. If they wanted him to do things that are beyond the scope of guide work, it probably can’t be done!